The 20th British Academy Video Game Awards were hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts on 11 April 2024 to honour the best video games of 2023.[1] Held at the Queen Elizabeth HallinLondon, the ceremony was hosted by comedian Phil Wang for the first time.[2] Nominations were announced on March 7, 2024, with epic fantasy roleplaying game Baldur's Gate 3 earning a leading eleven nominations. Charity SpecialEffect was honoured with the BAFTA Special Award for their work in making gaming more accessible to people with physical disabilities.[3]Baldur's Gate 3 received the most wins at the ceremony, with five including Best Game.
For the 20th BAFTA Games Awards, a number of changes were announced:[4]
Voting opened on 1 June 2023, three months earlier than the previous ceremony.
Submissions for the awards are now encouraged within 30 days of launch, with developers and publishers who submit their games within this window being charged half the price of a regular submission. BAFTA advised that this is to give members more time to play each of the submissions and to encourage them to play games that they normally wouldn't, with BAFTA chair Tara Saunders stating that "our goal is to allow more people to play a broader selection of titles ahead of the first round voting and continue to make the awards as representative of the industry as we can."
Winners of Best Game and British Game are now selected by the entire BAFTA Games membership, with all 1000+ members being invited to vote. Previously, the winners of these categories were decided by a jury of industry experts. All other categories will continue to be decided by juries, with Saunders explaining that "juries only allow for a small amount of the membership to be involved, so the changes we’ve made are to be more inclusive to all members. Jury discussions are especially great when they are focused around a specific craft or element of a game, like animation, art direction, audio, and so on. We feel it’s important to continue to build specialist juries of highly-skilled talent that know the award category inside out and this will continue to be an important part of the awards process for us. Although award categories like Best Game and British Game still work in the jury format, by going back out to all members, it will have a positive impact on overall membership engagement and bring wider opinions into awards. They are all qualified to give input and we trust our members to vote wisely and with consideration to uphold the quality that the BAFTA games awards is already known for in the industry."
On 14 December 2023, BAFTA released their official longlist for the first time, featuring over sixty games across their seventeen categories. Larian Studios' epic fantasy RPG Baldur's Gate 3 lead longlist appearances, with fifteen, followed by Remedy Entertainment's survival horror game Alan Wake II, which is longlisted fourteen times. Other top performing games include Insomniac's action-adventure game Spider-Man 2 which received ten appearances, and Avalanche Software's fantasy action-RPG Hogwarts Legacy which featured nine times.[5][6] Regarding the decision to reveal the longlist to the public, rather than informing developers and publishers directly that their game has been longlisted as they have in the past, Saunders stated that "by now doing so, we hope this transparency will recognise and shine a light on a wider selection of games ahead of the jury and round two vote stages".
The nominees were announced on 7 March 2024 via a livestream on the official BAFTA YouTube channel hosted by journalist Lucy James and panelists Isla Hinck, Blessing Adeoye, Jr., Leah Alexandra, and Aoife Wilson.[8][9]
