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Following Grand Theft Auto 6’s retreat into 2026, last week’s launch of Nintendo Switch 2 will likely stand as the gaming event of 2025. And at the center of that launch is Mario Kart World, an ambitious sequel to one of the best-selling games of all time from perhaps the single most revered game studio in the world: Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development (to give Nintendo’s game development arm its full title).
You’d think such an auspicious title would be a near-automatic contender for Game of the Year at The Game Awards in December. Not so. Mario Kart World has gone down well with critics, if not as well as its predecessor or as some other 2025 games. But the fact is that even if it had a Metacritic rating of 96, trouncing all its competition, it still wouldn’t be a credible contender, and probably wouldn’t even get nominated. That’s because it’s a racing game.
I’ve discussed The Game Awards jury’s genre bias before: the short version is that action-adventures and role-playing games are strongly favored, especially if they have a strong focus on story. Sports, sim, strategy, fighting, and racing games are clean out of luck. It doesn’t matter how good they are and how much reviewers loved them — they will not get nominated in the GOTY category. It has never happened.
As far as racing games are concerned, there are two cases that provide conclusive precedent for their status as absolute no-hopers in the Game of the Year competition.
The first is, appropriately enough, Mario Kart 8, widely considered the perfect expression of this vastly popular series. Its original Wii U incarnation was released in 2014, the first year of The Game Awards. It reviewed well, with a rating of 88 on both Metacritic and Opencritic — not as high as some of that year’s games, like Bayonetta 2 and Dark Souls 2, but at least on a par with the eventual winner, Dragon Age: Inquisition. It won both the Best Family and Best Sports/Racing Game categories handily, but wasn’t nominated for Game of the Year. (Neither was Nintendo’s other big game that year, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U/3DS, which did have a 92 Metascore, better than any of the nominated games.)
An even more damning example is Forza Horizon 5. It was one of the best-reviewed games of 2021, if not the very best. And that was a pretty soft year for new releases, resulting in one of the weakest Game of the Year fields in The Game Awards’ history, and a surprise win for Hazelight’s co-op adventure, It Takes Two. Forza Horizon 5, as the only game in contention with a 90-plus Metascore, should have walked it. But again, it wasn’t even nominated.
Sealing Mario Kart World’s fate is the fact that it’s not in Forza Horizon 5’s class, critically speaking. Reviews have appeared gradually — no early access was provided to press — but have now settled at 87 on Metacritic and 86 on Opencritic. Reviewers (like me) admire it, but have some criticisms of the implementation of an open world in a game that turns over a new page for Mario Kart.
Nintendo’s slim hope for repeating its GOTY triumph in the Switch’s launch year with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild now rests with Donkey Kong Bananza or perhaps Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. If they turn out well, either could score a nomination; last year, winner Astro Bot opened the GOTY door to family-friendly platform games, and Metroid has been nominated before (Metroid Dread in 2021).
But Mario Kart World’s chances of a GOTY nomination or win were zero before anyone had played it. The strange genre blindness of the GOTY jury sees to that. It could be argued that genres like racing games are too niche to be considered, or at least too niche to be widely played enough among The Game Awards’ large jury. But Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s 68 million sales put the lie to that; everybody plays Mario Kart.
Instead, the uncomfortable truth is that the critical community for video games, of which The Game Awards’ jury is a pretty broad sample, does not consider racing games — or fighting games, or sims, or the rest — to be capable of greatness or a true representation of the art. That’s surely an assumption worth challenging.
