I don't know if I'm totally opposed but I do fear that it will open the floodgates and I'd hate to be in the position of having to decide which updates are big enough to be considered or not. It could get ugly.
Please post over the next 36 hours if you want to allow updates to be considered or not. Let's see what people think then stick to that outcome, I'll firmly edit the original post rules from there. Allow updates - yes or no? I don't feel my personal opinion should matter much either and would like to hear more from the community. I've tried not to set a rule for including updates or not by deferring to community nominations... let's see what comes up for or opposing over the next day or so. I'd assume that if a title is nominated by enough people then a consensus is the update is a worthy addition (which also have an element of evaluating update quality barring trivial maintenance patches). If updates are allowed it should be clearly new material.
No. Three nominations is not a consensus by any means. In fact most people who participate in the poll don't even post in the thread. All it takes is a few regular forum goers who are fans of a particular game. Then any time that game adds new content (a regular occurrence in mobile gaming) that game could be nominated again and again. Basically if you allow updates at all, you allow all updates. There isn't a great quantitative way of judging degree of novelty in an update unless you want to look at the code and determine number of lines changed from the previous version.
I'd also vote no. I just think it could become a base of core fans of a game nominating it over and over again. A good example is Badland. That game has had what I would consider three major updates to content. Would that justify it winning GoTW 4 weeks in one year? I really, really like Badland (it's one of my GoTY nominees), but I don't think that would be fair to other games released every time a big update was made. And I think it's too subjective to say what would or wouldn't qualify. So on that basis, I think it's just better to have cut and dry rules.
Angry Birds Go! Yes it's freemium but unlike San Andreas the frame rate is stable. With SA being a terrible port I will nominate the only other game I got this week. (Prefer strike force heroes extraction to both ATM.) P.S updates should not make the vote because this could happen Let's imagine that there was an update ever week for IB3. GotW 1 : ib3 v1.0 GotW 2 : ib3 v1.1 GotW 3 : ib3 v1.2 And this goes on every week for the whole year. How many good games would not win because of updates?
I don't disagree, thanks for raising the point. It looks like a clear consensus is no to updates so unless a choir of others chime in otherwise that secures things. I've added the following to the GOTW rules - "4) Game updates, no matter how significant are not eligible for GOTW. There are enough new games to nominate that haven't been considered before." It was a good idea and fair point that some updates are so significant they stand out, thanks anyway.
Here are my noms: 1.Angry Birds Go. 2.Gregg. Don't know why so many people hate Angry Birds Go, it will be in my top ten for Game Of The Year, so there you go.