Fans have discovered that The Game Awards has historically made poor "final" announcements.

There has been a lot of interest in the upcoming live service hero shooter Highguard since its presentation at The Game Awards last month. This is a new Star Wars title helmed by Casey Hudson, and Divinity had the unfortunate fortune of being the “final” announcement at the same show that saw the reveal of Mega Man.

The studio's radio silence following the reveal didn't help, although it was later reported that Highguard hadn't actually paid for the “final” release.

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I'm glad no one is talking about high guards.

No news is good news.

But Highguard wasn't the only one to make a “disappointing” final announcement at the annual year-end awards show, as one greedy gamer found out. In fact, historically speaking, the final presentation of The Game Awards has been pretty ordinary.

Looking at this title, Highguard doesn't deserve the backlash.

On Reddit, a user compiled the final announcements for each of the past 10 editions of The Game Awards, and with a few rare exceptions, the results were somewhat disappointing.

Here are the last facts from the past 10 years:

2025 — High Guard
2024 — Galaxy: Heretic Prophet
2023 — Monster Hunter Wild
2022 — Final Fantasy 16 Release Date Trailer
2021 — The Matrix Awakens: Unreal Engine Tech Demo
2020 — Mass Effect
2019 — Fast and Furious Crossroads
2018 — Dead by Daylight DLC
2017 — Metro Exodus
2016 — Mass Effect Andromeda
2015 — The Walking Dead: Michonne

The Walking Dead: Michonne's Experience hit at a time when Telltale fatigue was at an all-time high and it wasn't very well received. Mass Effect Andromeda received heavy criticism upon release and holds a user score of 5.1 on Metacritic.

Metro Exodus is actually a great game, but it's definitely not going to be the “final game”, especially with the DLC for Breath of the Wild and the trailer for Death Stranding. DLC for live service multiplayer games isn't quite “Wow” either.

What's really interesting is Fast & Furious Crossroads, a now-delisted title that had a review score of 35 on Metacritic in 2019. We've yet to see anything substantial from the next Mass Effect, and like Fast & Furious before it, the demo for The Matrix no longer exists. It was also a huge advertisement for both the bad Matrix movies and Unreal.

I'll wait a bit for The Heretic Prophet to come out, but FF 16 was great and MH Wilds was solid at launch. So Highguard became our most recent and most ridiculed announcement.

I'll ultimately let you be the judge on all things, but if you ask me, more than half of the presentations were bad. This makes the high guard situation even more puzzling. Sure, the game may seem uninteresting, but the fact that many people pretend that the “end” point is an annual game changer is unfounded.