Duuude, lol, I bought it probly 6 months after release, so I could be wrong about that one.

I think Skyrim definitely deserves GOTY because it delivers a true open world RPG experience where you're free to roam the world and basically create your own adventure. It has raised the bar for what most of us thought was possible for any game of this generation. Its an extremely addictive game that consumes your life!

Most games reviewers have given Skyrim around 9.5 to 10/10 and have stated that the bugs are only minor and don't distract you from a truly amazing experience and I whole heartedly agree with this. All games have bugs, some worse than others but I don't believe that these should be a factor when deciding whether a game deserves to be GOTY or not as bugs can be fixed.

Skyrim should be judged on what it actually does do which is creates a level of immersion that is rare for games these days. Its a game that has you playing for days, not hours and gives you the ability to do be whoever you want to and do whatever you want to do and doesn't walk you down a linear path to the end credits.....and it has dragons!

Skyrim deserves Game Of The Year.......hell, in my opinion it deserves Game Of The Decade!

I don't know, I'm so disenfranchised/dissapointed from this game, maybe for consol players it's great, but for a pc gamer it svcks my chocolates.

It is a good excuse, especially in an open sandbox kind of world. The more linear the game is, the more controlled the experience will be and the less excuses you have for bugs. That's one reason why linear games are produced more often, they're just much easier to produce.

Properly testing a game like Skyrim is a big challenge when compared with other games. I already expected most stuff would only be found and fixed after launch by the millions that test it for many hours a day.

Bethesda has been taking chances to produce a unique product that is very hard to pull off and they've had to deal with the pros and cons of that decision. I hope they keep doing this though, I don't mind having bugs at launch that will be fixed afterwards as long as they keep producing the kind of game I want to play.

To all the haters claiming Skyrim doesn't deserve GOTY...then what does? Skyrim is a monumental achievement in fantasy immersion and epic exploration. One of the best games ever made. Crushes other fantasy games for sheer visual beauty, depth and vast reach. Buggy it may be, but nothing else this year deserves the title. Modern [censored]fare 3? Refines the last two iterations but is just another fun outing. Battlefaild 3? Sure, DICE patches it well, but that doesn't mask the crappiness of singleplayer or the underwhelming destructibility compared to BC2. Batman Arkham Sh*tty? Playing that one right now and enjoying it mightily but where Skyrim shines it bungles the open world - an overwhelming number of things to find, stop-and-go story and a gadget interface system that makes Skyrim look optimized for PC. And ultimately it's nothing legendary in gaming terms - more Batman, better than before. Portal 2, which offers about 5 hours of brilliance but is almost more meme than meat. Even The Witcher 2, easily the best in story and level of choice, can't hold a claim to GOTY - it'll run you a solid 2-4 playthroughs before you start to sleepwalk through the optimal levelling path (stopped my 6th because Skyrim arrived). Skyrim - sure, it's got a buggy few quests, a couple annoying ones, but there's so much to see, and to do, and all in all it's a seamless experience where previous TES games have felt like a funnel - the more I played with my Oblivion character, the less I wanted to bother playing again so as not to go through the minefield of levelling...whereas in Skyrim Bethesda has left you freespirited, able to wander the Nordic realm in and out of caves, cities and canyons, where levelling is a good thing but not desperately striven for, where you can engage in almost any activity a medieval fantasy world could contain, where adventuring is exciting and dynamic in a world of breathtaking visuals around every corner, day or night. srsly. GOTY 2011.

I've been insanely lucky also then . As has my daughter on a different PC and her fiancee and my wife on different PCs and oh yeah about 3 of my daughter's friends whom I've talked about it in depth. Its my GOTY as have been all the TES before it since Morrowind.

As much as I love Skyrim, I have to agree. Definitely not GOTY.

I do believe is deserves Game of the Year. There are three separate copies in our home (two PC and one xbox), and there was only a serious issue with one copy (CTD coming out Jorvaskkar, but can be fixed with a console command). I've encountered a couple quest bugs, but thank goodness they were ones I could return to the quest giver and get a new one. My main character is unable to start the Blood on the Ice quest, but am I so upset that I think the game is horrible? Of course not. I figure at some point, it might get fixed, but if my main never gets to do it, I'm not going to lose sleep over it or complain to Bethesda about it. I have another character that I timed specifically to get that quest, and have thus completed it, so everything works out. As far as buggy games, not all bugs can be caught. When you have millions of people playing an open world game, and do things in all types of orders, how are they supposed to know that if you do one quest at one point, that it will interfere with another one at some other point? With all the quests available in the game, I find this nearly impossible to test, or know about. But, with the help of players bringing up their gaming bugs, and then they can work to figure out what is happening, they can then fix what is wrong. I've had some bugs, and texture issues, but I suppose I'm just a little more easy going and I just go work on something else, or reload the game. I congratulate Bethesda on a wonderful game that has provided me with many, many hours of enjoyment, and will continue to do so for some time to come. And even if I experience a "game-breaking" bug, oh well. But, thank you for your opinion. Game of the Year: well deserved.

You do realise that Fallout 3, Oblivion and even Morrowind all contained way more bugs than Skyrim on initial release day right? I'm not saying that makes it okay for Bethesda to ignore said bugs but they always seem to be rather swift on patching said bugs. The fact is it is impossible to develop a 100% bug free game, and taking into account just how much code Skyrim contains, think yourself lucky the game isn't buggier than it is.

GOTY? - no way. There are better games this year. TES has more fans, but that doesn't mean everything they do should become GOTY.

Going by fanbase, Call of Duty likely has the largest, but the games themselves are copy-pasted from the previous year.
Says a lot about the intelligence of this generation's gaming crowd doesn't it.

It sure does. Easy money for big companies...

What games? Talked about it at the end of the last page and there isn't much. Battlefield 3 is underwhelming, Modern Warfare 3 is more of the same, Arkham City raises the bar for superhero games but it's an inferior world to Skyrim, and has major lag issues...Witcher 2 is the deepest, most mature storyline this year, would say it's the closest behind Skyrim. What else came out? Mass Effect 3 got delayed, Dead Space 2 was fun and solid but nothing more...Minecraft is a fun way to waste time but again, not GOTY...and Portal 2 is a 6-7 hour, the first 2 hours of which are dull-as-dirt puzzles before the interesting dialogue/story kicks in. You don't get GOTY for a couple dozen pages of good writing, as good as that writing was. One of my close friends would troll and say SR3, but seriously. What could honestly contend with Skyrim and legitimately beat it for GOTY? Truth be told I was kind of a hater before the footage got good and the details of the gameplay began to trickle out, I bought it on release on a whim and it earned its way up from there to definitive GOTY.

SR3 can be summed up with one word: Penetrator.

GOTY? Maybe, that really is a judgement call. But best studio, they definitely do not deserve that title. While Skyrim may be immersive and have an exceptional world to explore. Best studio awards should factor in the fact that this game has no QA. When players can not finish the Main quest because of bugs, that is a failure for the entire studio. The fact that every Bethesda title ships with major bugs, shows that they are a studio that can make a fun game in concept but continually fail on delivery. Bethesda definitely does not deserve to be called the best studio, when they can only get half the game done.

I think it is Battlefield 3, if you ask me... So much work was put into that game. TRUELY new engine, new feeling of the game, outstanding graphics and sound, great oprimisation, AND NO FANS HUMILIATION TOO - everyone who loved battlefield was content with it at the very least. I think that game truly desrves the GOTY title. And not Skyrim - the sorry... Follout 3 DLC, that it is.

http://n4g.com/news/865135/bethesda-qa-tester-beats-skyrim-in-2-16-10-in-speedrun-challenge/com#c-5938086

No wonder QA didn't catch any of the bugs on release. Seriously, if they're gonna goof around then they better deliver on release day, else I'd rather not know how they do their jobs. If they'd released this game earlier this year and not so close to the VGAs, other games probably would've taken the spotlight and the bugs would've been taken into account. Same reason top-billed movies prefer showing around Oscar season.

I have to agree. While I do enjoy the game, Skyrim is a sad monument of where the Game Industry is going. It's about sales, not the quality of the product. Skyrim is a good game, but is missing numerous features talked about prior to launch, running on nearly the same game engine, plagued with more bugs than even the standard Bethesda product. Skyrim is all about quantity over quality, it amazes me that they've released a product that is so incomplete. They haven't even bothered patching any of the major bugs.

I've come to expect buggy games from Bethesda(which they're working to make bug-filled launches and industry standard at this point), but Skyrim is bad even for them. I say this not as a person that didn't complete the game due to a quest bug or something of the like, I've run 3 different characters through the majority of the content and worked my way around many of the bugs myself. So many features just feel incomplete and are made useless by the glitches. I'd be satisfied if I was beta-testing, but this feels like an incomplete product. I would have hoped for better from one of the leading RPG game studios.

I think people complain far too much about minor issues in this game, but what do you expect with a game that has over 400 quests? If anything they should have lowered the number and bothered to test them all. I'm not bothered by the minor bugs, unless it's a quest that is broken, which I have yet to find. It was the same with Fallout 3, many people complained about it, but I never encountered a bug in it and I completed it 100%. What I AM bothered by is the interface and the controls. and those are basics. TES fanatics have gotten used to it, but the controls are severely lacking and unresponsive and the interface just plain svcks. Having to go through several menus to activate an ability or select something that went wrong through the favorites screen, all the while interrupting combat, is something that bothers me. The fact that I cannot jump while running is bothersome. In fact jumping is an ordeal altogether. Jumping up a cliff or mountain or over something usually results in clipping through an object and getting stuck for 3 seconds. Walking in mountain areas reminds me of driving the Mako in Mass Effect. Trust me, that's not a good thing. People here were wondering why we use fast travel. Why? Because no way in hell am I going to hike up that fu?king mountain again.

One day Bethesda will be long forgotten as a remnant of crappy games of yesteryear. A company with no innovation doesn't deserve any accolades.

Once again, who cares about GOTY? If it was issues by a single, important agency it might matter (even then not really, the Grammys are a joke) but as it stands it's like having 50 random people on the street pick GOTY.

So why do people keep bringing it up? It doesn't matter!

"Game of the year" is not only a very subjective "title", but also one that comes about after PR campaigns and various forms of quid pro quo, Just like it happens with movies and the Oscars, songs and the Emmys, TV shows and the Grammys, etc etc etc. Really, that a game is "titled' GOTY means nothing, other than making the fanatics proud (why, I don't know) and bringing in more sales for the developer, as some people still value "critics" input on stuff like this (why, again, I don't know).

Goty is an Internet popularity contest. Tes fans are usually the most vocal on the Internet out of any other series. Tes fans delusionally crowned skyrim goty before it even came out. It will happen with six as well.

Here's a novel idea, if it bothers you so much. Don't buy Bethesda games.

Every single Bethesda game ever has been full of bugs, some of them game-breaking. They still got GotY. I still don't understand why Skyrim is being singled out.

Honestly, the bugs are just another reason to buy the game for the PC.