At midnight on Wednesday, Crimson Desert, the ambitious new open-world game by Pearl Abyss, was running second only to Grand Theft Auto 6 on Kalshi’s prediction market for Game of the Year 2026 at The Game Awards. It had just hit a 25% likelihood to win the prize, ahead of Resident Evil Requiem at 12%. Trading on Crimson Desert had brought GTA 6 down under 40% for the first time. Here, Kalshi’s community of prognosticators were betting, was a real contender: a game that could take the fight to Rockstar’s behemoth, and maybe even win.
Then, on Wednesday evening, the Crimson Desert review embargo dropped. The game now sits at a respectable-but-not-really 78 on Metacritic; according to the review aggregation site, it’s the 38th best game of the year to date. Its Kalshi odds dropped as precipitously as Pearl Abyss’ share price. The dream was over.
Crimson Desert had spent months being hyped as the next big thing: the biggest open world, the most features, the best graphics, the most detailed simulation. That it was made by a Korean studio with no track record in AAA single-player adventures (Pearl Abyss was previously a massively multiplayer online game specialist) might have been a red flag, but instead it only seemed to add to its allure. Hype and hope for the game got out of control, and it was hard to know who was responsible: Pearl Abyss, the influencers who amplified the game’s legend, or the legion of gamers willing a new game-changer into existence. Perhaps it was a feedback loop between all three.
But that kind of post-mortem isn’t the remit of this awards punditry column. The question before us is: Can Crimson Desert still win anything at The Game Awards? Can it even get nominated for GOTY?
The answer to the first question is a firm no, unless The Game Awards introduces a Technical Achievement category. The answer to the second is… still no, on balance, but a sliver of possibility remains.
The Game Awards are voted on by critics and journalists from the games and mainstream media around the world. As such, there’s a strong correlation between the awards and Metacritic scores within the jury’s favored genres. As a large-scale open-world role-playing game with high production values, Crimson Desert sits squarely in TGA’s genre sweet spot. So it has that going for it.
But a sub-80 Metascore would seem to disqualify it immediately from Game of the Year contention. According to a Polygon analysis, since the awards began in 2014, no game with a Metascore below 80 has ever been nominated for Game of the Year. (There is one asterisk: in 2017, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was nominated during its early access phase, when few reviews had been published. Its rating on Metacritic at the time was “TBD.” After its official 1.0 release in December of that year, its Metascore was in the 75-85 range depending on platform; it now sits at 86.)
That’s a mountain of historical precedent to climb. It only gets steeper. Over time, as The Game Awards jury has expanded and diversified internationally, it has correlated even more strongly with Metacritic. A result like 2014’s, when Dragon Age Inquisition won with a Metascore of 85 (ranked the 27th best game of the year), is inconceivable now. As The Game Awards edges closer to the critical consensus, Crimson Desert’s chances get even more remote.
But! There is one notable recent anomaly, and it’s a very relevant one. In 2024, Black Myth: Wukong was nominated for GOTY on the back of an 81 Metascore — the lowest ever for a GOTY nominee. Even more remarkably, it achieved the nomination amid a strong field of 90-plus scorers like Balatro, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and the eventual winner Astro Bot. Just like Crimson Desert, Black Myth was a gamers’ favorite hailing from an upstart East Asian studio — China’s Game Science — intent on crashing the AAA blockbuster party.
There’s not such a huge gap between the two games, and it opens a narrow path to nomination for Crimson Desert, even if the rest of the year yields a strong field of contenders. Time will tell if the game’s Metacritic rating improves. It’s possible, since review code arrived late and some sites refrained from publishing final reviews, although some reviews-in-progress were based on over 100 hours’ play and the reviewers’ opinions seemed pretty settled. Reviews were only conducted on PC; the console versions may be received differently. Time will also tell if Crimson Desert’s legion of well-wishers stick with it once they have the game in their hands.
Black Myth didn’t exactly wow critics, but most acknowledged that it had achieved what it set out to do with polish and flair. Crimson Desert is different. It is a wildly ambitious game that critics admire for its astonishing scope, but find sorely lacking in its execution of key areas, including story and game design (both big factors for The Game Awards jury). That’s going to make it even harder for Pearl Abyss’ game to break through. Ironically for a game all about expansive vistas, Crimson Abyss’ path to The Game Awards is through a paper-thin fissure.
