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“Best of Show Awards” 2015 Open To the Public

Arcadian 5

For the past few years I had ran a poll for Arcade Game Of The Year, although for 2014 I missed out on that, being pre-occupied with some other items on my plate. Awards for the arcade/amusement industry usually don’t generate a lot of external press but they do exist and one we have mentioned on the blog before is the Best of Show Awards (BOSA) which are put on annually by a partnership of the news service The Stinger Report and equipment distributor BMIGaming.com. They take a look at the products introduced at the IAAPA trade show event and run internal votes as to what products were deserving of Gold, Silver Bronze and Honorable Mention Awards. Those are based upon factors such as innovation, profile, chances of it selling well, etc. The story I ran on last year’s awards  can be found here.

bosagold

For this year, the categories are similar but they are taking a slightly different approach in gauging what is deserving of the top spots by opening up the voting to the public. You can goto this page on BMIGaming.com and place your vote. The Jurassic Park motion game was in the lead for the public vote but at the moment it appears that Pump It Up fans have caught wind of it so that has skyrocketed into 2nd place as I write this. I imagine that things will change as word spreads and it will be interesting, as it always is, to see what comes out on top. Online votes of course are not exactly what one would consider to be purely scientific but it is still fascinating to see what is being voted for. I would just like to know the ‘why’ behind every vote.

Here is a short trailer to promote the awards as well, the Gold winners will receive plaques at the upcoming Amusement Expo 2015 in Las Vegas.

So what would be your pick for such an award – or an “Arcade Game of The Year 2014” Award?

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Arcadian

Website: https://arcadeheroes.com

I'm a lifelong fan of video games and I have been operating my own arcade, Arcade Galactic in West Valley City, Utah since 2008. Soft spots in my heart for Atari, Sega, and Nintendo.

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5 comments
Arcades4ever

its hard for me to say right now as I’ve only come across star wars battle pod and no other games yet so I’d rather not vote until I’ve played them. how come its not shown any of the games from namco? there weren’t time crisis 5, lost land adventure or even star wars.

Reply
    arcadehero

    TC5 wouldn’t be on there since they only count product shown at IAAPA but long story short, some Namco exec from Europe saw them filming Battle Pod and threw a pissy fit saying that they couldn’t do that – when 20-30 people were standing there doing the same thing. So TSR/BMI said fine, we won’t give you any recognition then (and they were quite upset, understandably). It was just one guy, the other Namco people didn’t have a problem with it AFAIK but that’s all it takes. It’s not the first time I’ve seen an exec at a show not be happy with awards, a couple of years ago I was asked to help take the pictures of the company execs receiving the BOSA awards at Amusement Expo and a Sega exec outright said in no uncertain terms, no thanks we don’t want it, which caused a little argument on the floor. I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want an award from anyone inside the business, the joys of internal business politics I guess.

    Reply
      Sam

      “I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want an award from anyone inside the business”

      You just answered that question with your example about the filming of Battle Pod. How can the award be given any credibility if a petty disagreement about filming causes not only the game but the whole company’s lineup to be removed from voting. If you want an award to be credible, the inclusion of a game should strictly be based on a certain criteria and not on personal matters. I can totally see that SEGA exec’s point of view (although I don’t know the whole story) when the selection/voting process is biased.

      Reply
        arcadehero

        I agree it should not be based on personal matters and as mentioned I was not there for this particular occurrence, I only heard about it afterwards. I’m not sure what each execs views are on this stuff but it does seem like they tend to take the personal matters to these levels which ruffles feathers and it ends up causing unnecessary friction. EDIT: I should add that Mach Storm was included in the previous year where it won an award, there were no disputes about anything at the time IIRC.

Jay Fleming / General Manager

Incredible how a marketing staffer from Bandai Namco is complaining about the credibility of the BOSA Awards, after accepting several BOSA Awards for their products in past years..

The criteria our panel of judges use for selecting BOSA Awards Nominees is *publicly* available on the current BOSA Awards Page at :

http://www.bmigaming.com/arcade-machine-awards.htm

So why was Namco (and Baytek) not included in this year’s BOSA Awards? Quite simply, if a manufacturer refuses our judges and staff access to review and video tape their products on display at the annual IAAPA Attraction Expo, we cannot seriously considered them for a BOSA Award.

At this year’s show, having already notified Bandai Namco’s USA staff we would be filming and reviewing their games, a European representative of Namco rudely stopped our team at the beginning of our review session by saying “we have no permission to film their products”, all while a large, visible crowd at the Namco booth were doing just that as he spoke.

Perhaps you should talk to your European staff as to why they decided to shut Namco out of consideration this year, and stop trying to attack the credibility of our awards, which we all take very seriously here.

And for 2015, we now offer the *general public* the chance to have their voices heard on what BOSA Nominees they would choose as the best games, to offer arcade machine buyers worldwide a second perspective on new arcade machine popularity.

Reply