If I will give the name Judgment anything it is that it taught me that Judgement and Judgment are both acceptible ways to spell the same word because English is a nightmare language.
As someone that was taught Judgement was the correct spelling seeing Judgment on the case made me feel insane.

The DICE awards already do something similar to this and the awards are just as bad and go to an even slimmer pool of games because shockingly lots of oversees games get left out.
The only game dev I've ever known in my life barely even plays new releases. It doesn't work out how you would expect.

You listed every reason I love it right there.

... Them finding genAI in the game that "slipped through" makes you question did they decided of a more sparse artstyle with less detail because it was easier to generate those images and have someone touch it up after rather than hire an artist to produce and iterate on the artwork.

... Anno 1800 had lots of detail on objects, buildings and characters and human faces visible in artwork while 117 has lots of barren space (like sheep in an field with a shepherd but the shepherd is facing away in the artwork). It also has a simplier painted artstyle...

I am a big Anno fan and the new game 117 having genAI art in it ruins the ability to engage with the art of the game because it is hard to know if the art decisions were a result of an artist making a choice or decisions to make it easy on the AI generator.
A lot of the art in the previous game...

So I think they've messed up how YouTube recommends videos with that feature. The priority of video recommendations is messed up. It used to be that it would recommend a smaller channel in English for a niche game but now it recommends a larger German channels but auto dubs it badly.

... I want to note that it taints a lot of the art in the game. I am struggling to explain it in a good way but the game feels like it art was dictated by the limits of genAI.
A lot of the art is simpler in complexity to 1800, in a if we add more complexity the AI might explode kinda way.

As a fan of this series I want to note that the placeholder thing seems like an lame excuse. The art is a significant downgrade for Anno 1800. The image in the article thumbnail is from a dialogue screen and a lot of the art in the loading screens look like touched up genAI art...

It isn't just a loading screen, hell this screenshot is from a dialogue screen, it is everywhere.

If you check their account replies it is them just purely arguing with anybody that has issues with AI. It is so sad.
A lot of my dad works at nintendo energy from their posts.

It is frustrating because season passes are of dubious value with some being worth it and others being frankly scams with season passes that are purely for cosmetics perhaps being the most evil things I've seen being priced like actual game content like a new region or questline in an rpg.

I think it was in the Skill Up video on E33 but apparently the marketing department recommend using part of the budget for marketing to hire some Hollywood acting talent such as Charlie Cox and Andy Serkis as it would drive interest. An added bonus is E33 seems AAA despite not being.

Oh, I thought I was prepared for how bad that would sound.
I can't believe the 9/11 AI song is better.

Just to add that I am refering to Square here because I think the news reporting on their fiscal reports fuck up the normies perception of successful game sales. That just got past on to how we look at sales for everything including Nintendo.

... you see it often, even on Bluesky, when a game sells 1 million and people are like "that's it!". They can't perceive that a game might have been budgeted around selling 1 million copies vs 10 million.
Square's failures are a result of poor fiscal management vs actual interest in their IP.

I've been think a lot about how humans struggle to visualise numbers and I think part of it is that Square had a lot of games do 3 million and said it was a failure and then you have the actual anomalies like CoD that sell 20 to 30 million copies.
It messes up the perception of what success is...

AI’s plagiarism laundering should absolutely be fought with zeal, but false accusations, ignorance of art techniques, misunderstanding the problem to the point of “computers bad,” it’s all gonna discredit and obfuscate the thing that should be fought.

Same goes for using “AI” as a casual insult.