A new awards show, the MMO Awards, is setting up to air its first annual awards show on August 31st.
Founded and hosted by content creator Gillian "Eiya" Long, who is part of Team Liquid, the awards will air at the end of the month, handing out awards for "The Sprout Award," "Cosplayer of the Year," and more. It's an awards show marketed as an "MMO" award show, yet there are decidedly few awards for actual MMOs.
In fact, there is a single MMO category: "MMO of the Year," whose nominees include World of Warcraft, Old School RuneScape, Final Fantasy XIV, and Tarisland. It's not immediately clear how those were chosen to be the best MMOs of the year, though it can be argued that at least two of them will vie for top billing this Winter when we do our own End of Year Awards.
The rest of the awards seem centered on highlighting creators in the space, as well as community-ran events. So don't expect to see the likes of Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival or Warframe's TennoCon 2024 win Event of the Year - these are reserved for fan-led (or organization-led) event.
The award show also has categories such as "Video of the Year," which recognizes creators with long-form content (such as Marco Meatball's excellent "I Hate Flow from Final Fantasy XIV" video), awards for both the best MMO content creator and International (non-English speaking) creator in the space, and more.
How the categories and nominees were selected isn't explained. There's no information on the official MMO Awards website that talks about its selection process, judging, nor how it came up with the award categories - and why, in an MMO award show, there are next to no actual MMO awards. The awards themselves seem centered on the content creators in the space and not the actual games, which is fine, but the name makes it seem at first glance that this is, first and foremost, an MMO award show.
We reached out to the Awards through a Twitter DM (since there is no contact information on the official website for press inquiries) last week to get clarification on the awards, the organizers, and how the categories were determined, but by publication time, these requests went unanswered. We've also reached out to the PR team that published a press release back in May and will update this article should we receive a reply.
Voting is now closed for the awards, but you can checkout the nominees on the X page. The awards themselves will be hosted on Eiya's Twitch channel on August 31st at 7pm Central time.
