Somehow, EA Sports College Football 25 didn’t receive a single nomination at The Game Awards 2024. For the most part, sports games never end up receiving a vast amount of nominations at The Game Awards outside of their own genre category. Even if they’re some of the highest-selling games year in and year out, no one ever expects to see Madden or NBA 2K in the running for Game of the Year. Still, College Football 25 failed to even land a nomination within its own genre for 2024, which is truly odd given how well-regarded it has been.
The full list of nominees for The Game Awards 2024 were revealed today and while it seemed likely that College Football 25 would be up for the honor of Best Sports/Racing Game, this wasn’t the case. Instead, it was beat out in the category by the likes of NBA 2K25, WWE 2K24, Top Spin 2K25, F1 24, and EA Sports FC 25. While all of these sports games are popular in their own right, what makes the omission of College Football 25 here even more bizarre is that it reviewed better than each title that received a nomination.
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While Metacritic is by no means a perfect science, the aggregate review score for College Football 25 upon its launch earlier this year was a strong 83/100. This score was considerably higher than just about every other game that did receive a nomination, with WWE 2K24 coming closest with an 81/100 score. Every other title then fell below the 80/100 threshold, which tends to mean that they were mixed in their critical response.
So why exactly was College Football 25 left out of being nominated for Best Sports/Racing Game? Well, it likely has to do with the manner in which The Game Awards goes about putting together its nominations. For those not familiar, a jury comprised of multiple publications from around the globe is how The Game Awards ends up landing its nominees and eventual winners. While there are a vast number of outlets that hail from the United States in the jury, the majority of this panel stems from websites and other media platforms across Europe, Asia, Australia, and many other territories.
My belief is that College Football 25 was likely left out at The Game Awards as a result of football being an American sport. College Football 25, while big in the U.S., surely had no impact on other regions around the globe. As such, more familiar sports like tennis, soccer, and F1 racing ended up having their respective sims get nominated in favor of CFB 25.
Even though this makes a fair amount of sense, it’s still a bit frustrating as it makes College Football 25 more of an omission at The Game Awards due to cultural differences rather than anything associated with the game itself. Those at Electronic Arts did a fantastic job with their return to the college football series and it would’ve been nice to have seen the team behind the title acknowledged for their effort in some small way. Still, it has to be a nice consolation prize for those at EA to have the top-selling video game of the year in the United States so far.
