GOTY lists from friends of GB?

Okay, yeah, I know it's Jan 16th. I've been caught up in a maelstrom of real life crap over the last couple of months and only came up for air today, so my brain went "Hey, I missed all the GOTY stuff, let me wander over to GB and see what's going on...."

I see the staff lists, but I don't see any of the usual "friends of the site" lists. Did they not do that this year? Or did it get buried in the site navigation somewhere? (I tried looking under "Words" but didn't see anything there.)

I don't think they did it this year. Staff lists were a last-minute decision, so I don't think calls went out for guest lists.

They initially said there wouldn't be any staff lists or guest lists, but then they all decided to do a staff list after the site top 10 was decided. Certainly would have seemed out of sorts for them to not have individual Top 10s considering there have been staff lists every year for over a decade. With everyone on staff being pulled in multiple directions with other parts of their job and their side hustles, I understand why it might have been difficult to wrangle.

Okay thanks for the answers.

Given the year they've had, I can certainly understand the need to simplify... but, man, I really liked those guest lists. It was another significant way GB differentiated itself from the rest of the gaming journalism/commentary/influencer world, and I hope they bring something like that back in the future.

If nothing else, it was a nice reminder that, in the grand scheme of things, video games are for everybody and while we may have differences of opinion of what we like and don't like, what is "good" and "bad", we can celebrate the idea of gaming together, of all the different ways we intersect with gaming, regardless of who we are.

Pretty sure Alex used to coordinate most of those guest lists. Given the number of contacts he has throughout this corner of the entertainment business and the amount of effort that seemed to go in to that process, I'm not surprised that no one has been able to carry that tradition on.

@redwing42: I believe someone curated the guest lists for end of 2021, even though Alex/Nextlander guys were no longer at the site. The site still has plenty of industry contacts to get in touch with (given the various guests you see on Arcade Pit and sometimes Games Mess Morning).

I think it’s only been end of 2022 GotY that had no guest lists. Reading between the lines, this was less a deliberate scaling back by the staff and more a “staff had to significantly shift GotY plans several times due to behind-the-scenes business stuff severely limiting either their time or resources,” but admittedly this is speculation.

I’m hopeful that friends of GB guest top 10s return next year when things have settled down from the Fandom acquisition.

I definitely missed Xavier Woods and Kenny Omega giving us the best self-insert fanfictions of all time.

I guess no more Zodiac Motherfucker lists ever again. :(