TGA Players' Voice Vote Turned into A Dramatic War Between Two Game Communities

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The Game Awards (TGA) is one of the biggest gaming events of the year. And the TGA Players' Voice category allows players to vote for their favorite game of the year. Unfortunately, this year, the vote triggered drama between the player communities of Sonic and Genshin Impact.

Both "Sonic Frontiers" and "Genshin Impact" are nominated in Players' Voice 2022, along with other popular games like "God of War Ragnarök", "Elden Ring", "Stray", "Minecraft" etc. In the beginning, Sonic Frontiers took a significant lead.

A screenshot of the vote results in Round 2 when Sonic was still in the 1st place.

On December 6th, people were surprised to find that Sonic Frontier was no longer in 1st place; Genshin Impact overtook it. Considering that Sonic enthusiasts had not seen a new platformer in the Sonic series for five years, it was understandable when many in the Sonic community got upset. Not to mention that Players' Voice was the only nomination Sonic Frontier got. Fans of Sonic soon started another voting campaign, begging people on social media to vote for Sonic Frontier.

However, some people believed the Genshin Impact community was using improper methods to "steal" the award. Some claimed HoYoverse "bribed" its player community. If Genshin Impact won awards, all the players would receive primogems, an important microtransaction currency to pull characters, as a reward. Some accused the Genshin Impact community of using bots since a large number of votes appeared during the nighttime in America.

Meanwhile, others pointed out that Genshin Impact has a much larger community than Sonic's, and there is a considerable amount of Genshin enthusiasts in Asia. That may explain why Genshin Impact's votes had a sudden increase during nighttime in North America.

Things began to escalate very quickly. Both communities were taking the vote seriously, and some among them became toxic. They claimed that the other side was using bots. Both sides made memes, often showing the protagonist of one game beating up the other game’s MC. Racist comments were flying around, and eventually, players on both sides reported that they had received death threats.

As a result, about 80% of the total votes in the Players' Voice were for either Sonic Frontier or Genshin Impact. The voting page of TGA was not working properly and eventually went down due to the large volume of voters. When it was back online, people found they could no longer see the vote results.

Thankfully, there were still many who remained calm and friendly. People from the subreddit r/SonicTheHedgehog and r/Genshin_Impact were apologizing for the toxic actions made by the other people in their community. And memes depicting friendly interaction between characters from both sides were made as a symbol of peace.