No One Was Around To Collect Life Is Strange: Double Exposure's Award For Social Impact Following Layoffs
It was among Balatro, Astro Bot, and other winners at the 2025 Game Developers Choice Awards
Maybe we should be barring these companies that dump their teams after releasing a game from winning awards?
Or give the awards directly to the credited teams, and not to the companies.
We don’t give Oscars to film companies. Imagine if an actor won an Oscar for a movie role, but didn’t walk up on stage to get it because they were already working on another movie. Sounds asinine, right? So why is it accepted in the game dev community?
Totally fair. Why should the business get the award when the people that made the thing that won the award no longer work for the business?
We should. This is fucking bullshit exploitation.
At the marketing circle jerk that is the other game awards, I would expect this. At the Game goddamn developers choice awards, yeah, show some support for the people. OR, make the effort to reach out to the people that made the game - some of them were actually at the GDC! It's not like they dropped off the face of the earth after being laid off.
Imagine a best actor award at the Oscars not having anyone come up because the actor left Miramax to join Universal afterwards - but the fucking guy is sitting in the audience.
What an embarrassment.
Thinking Max likely isn't returning then as promised at the end?
The series is definitely in trouble. Who knows, maybe SQEX will shuffle it off to a different studio again.
I liked life is strange, we ran off together and said fuck the town
Everything I read says that this game is dogshit. Just goes to show how fucking useless "video game awards" are.
Don't know anything about the game, but from the article it sounds like it was a commercial flop? Which would make it understandable that a lot of the dev team got laid off. This would be a different situation from those companies who had successes and then proceeded to lay off their dev teams anyway.
Looking at their most recent releases it seems pretty much every game aside from the original Life is Strange has been a commercial flop.
That's just Square Enix coding. All of their games are flops by their records.
