The CESA has announced some of the award winners of the Japan Game Awards 2020. Pokemon Sword and Shield won two awards at the same time, with Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare also winning one award each.
The Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry Award is awarded to an individual or a group of people that contributed to building the console game industry. This award went to the Animal Crossing: New Horizons development team from Nintendo.
The Global Awards are given to a Japanese title and a foreign title, both of which have gained a high reputation in the international market in 2019. The Global Award for Japanese Product was won by Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield, while the Global Award for Foreign Product went to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
The Special Award is earned by recommendations from the awards’ nomination committee. Dragon Quest Walk won this award—the location-based mobile game based on the popular Dragon Quest series that is currently available in Japan.
The Best Sales Award is awarded to the game that sold the most copies in Japan within the nomination period, which was from April 1, 2019, to March 31, 2020. Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield won this award for setting the highest sales amount during the period.
The Game Designers Award is decided by a panel of top Japanese game creators led by Masahiro Sakurai of Super Smash Bros fame. Yoko Taro joined the panel this year. Four games made it into the final nomination list:
- 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
- Gnosia
- Outer Wilds
- Baba Is You
The award was ultimately won by Baba Is You, a Finnish puzzle game with an innovative object rule manipulation system that is currently available on PCs and Nintendo Switch.
You can watch an archive of the awards announcement stream right below:
[tnm_video layout=”mnmd-post-media-wide”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlelqkR0is8[/tnm_video]
Another set of awards will be given on Sunday, September 27, 2020; 10 games will win Awards for Excellence, and one of them will be awarded the highest Grand Award. While CESA had also been giving Future Awards to upcoming games, such awards will not be given this year due to the lack of physical demos from the cancellation of the physical TGS event.
