Game leaks, Star Wars trailers, Chinese headcounts, a game about losing your fingers and an important email follow-up

A dispatch from The Game Awards 2025--or thereabouts

Control Resonant. Screenshot: Remedy Entertainment

Last week, to keep things simple, I told people that I was “going to The Game Awards.”

But I didn’t actually go into the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, where the awards were held. I last did that two years ago, when I sat behind a man who controlled a dashboard that allowed him—among other things—to flash a message to the award winners who were giving thank-you’s on stage to “Please Wrap It Up.”

For games reporters in LA during Game Awards week, there’s little value being inside the theater.

This isn’t like The Oscars, the Emmys or even the Spike Video Game Awards back in the day, when there’s a red carpet procession of attendees you can briefly quiz (with occasional newsmaking results). This isn’t the lower case video game awards tied to the DICE Summit or the Game Developers Conference, where you can—and I do—interview award-winners backstage, after they grab their trophies.

Everyone on the planet who tunes in will see who wins The Game Awards at the same time. Half of the show involves announcements of upcoming games, and like the E3 press events of yore, you don’t need to be in the room for those. You can just watch the official 4K60FPS Livestream, which is currently at 16.7 million views..

If you are a journalist and want to get any reporting done at the TGAs, your best bet is to simply be near the awards. You should probably saunter through the lobby of the JW Marriott, a two-minute walk from the Peacock Theater, where hundreds of games industry people gather days before and hours after the show.

At the Netflix watch party…

I watched The Game Awards from one of the JW’s bars, which was, for at least the second year in a row, rented out by Netflix. The streamer had their version of Boggle there for people to play. Netflix executives milled around, but there was no sign of Batman, Bugs Bunny and Harry Potter. Warner Bros. is not quite in the family, and may never be. There were certainly no on-the-record interviews available about What Might Happen Next.

But I did meet a guy whose company, Ex Machina, works on the back-end for live interactive shows, including Netflix’s new daily play-from-your-phone quiz show Best Guess Live. Netflix has a host on-set five days a week, which sounds ambitious. Neat fact I learned at the party: Ex Machina also handles voting for the TV show The Voice and helped operate Xbox Live’s live game show 1 vs. 100 back in the day (RIP!).

The Awards ran on TVs behind the bartenders. You could watch from a stool, which I did while also monitoring a Game File live chat.

There was free food at the Netflix watch party, including some meatballs that were passed around by a worker who said he was stoked by the TGA reveal of Fate of the Old Republic. FOTOR was one of the big trailers of the show: an upcoming Star Wars game from a new studio called Arcanaut, run by original Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) director Casey Hudson.

Adjacent to me at the watch party was Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, who charitably tempered the server’s expectations by saying the game wouldn’t be out for a long time. Jason would later impart this insight to people without meatball-related jobs via his Friday newsletter, where he wrote that “it’s fair to expect that the game won’t arrive until the 2030s.”

Hudson, whose studio was formed in July (yes, just five months ago), appeared to take umbrage. He later tweeted: “Don’t worry about the ‘not till 2030’ rumors. Game will be out before then.” If Hudson is right, GDC or DICE will need to book the Arcanaut team in 2029 or so, for a lectures on achieving unprecedented AAA modern video game development speed.

Leaks (and yelling at legal)

You could say the TGAs start a whole week or two ahead of the actual event. That’s when game makers pre-brief some members of the press about announcements they’ll make during the show. Thus, the moment a trailer hits, some outlets will publish impressions of the game. They saw it ahead of time. They chatted with the developers and signed off not to not run their report until then. Pretty standard stuff.

I’d gotten an online pre-brief about Control: Resonant, the 2026-slated sequel to Remedy Entertainment’s well-reviewed 2019 game Control.