The Game Awards nominees are annoyingly safe, but the Best Mobile Game category is a highlight

As much as we all love to have a good moan about lovely Geoff Keighley's baby, The Game Awards, I'll be the first to admit that they're always a late-year highlight in the world of gaming. Award shows are, in general, fairly awful, but year after year, the ad-dominated Game Awards manages to delicately balance utter tackiness with viral blunders in a way that makes them automatically more interesting than, say, the dull-as-dishwater Oscars.

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The nominees this year, especially in the Best Game category, are disappointingly dull. You've got Control, Death Stranding, Resident Evil 2, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, The Outer Worlds, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Outer Wilds and Disco Elysium are better than anything on that list, which is definitely something we can all easily agree on. That said, the Best Mobile Game nominees are, if you ask me, slightly more interesting.

Here are the nominees:

• Call of Duty: Mobile
• GRINDSTONE 
• Sayonara Wild Hearts 
• Sky: Children of the Light 
• What the Golf? 

No huge surprises, all told, but you have to admit that it's a little more varied than most of the other categories. The presence of What the Golf? alone lifts it above the Best Game bunch.

In terms of obvious omissions, Telling Lies, Card of Darkness, Neo Cab, Mutazione, and The Stillness of the Wind all deserved better. Truth be told, though, this has been an incredible year for mobile games, with too many stellar titles to choose from.

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Thanks to Apple writing countless blank cheques, tons of quality developers have released tons of quality games sans ads or IAPs. A walled-off subscription service on an overpriced platform is far from an ideal way to play the best indies, but I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase with Apple Arcade.

What do you make of The Game Awards? Are you hoping to see the glorious return of the Schick Hydrobot? Which games should win? All shall be revealed on December 12th.