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Nominations are open for the Deku Game of the Year Bracket Extravaganza!

Brackets, prizes, and emojis galore!

Deku has always been about our users and your passion for games, so we want you to decide the Deku Game of the Year. We’re trying an experiment this year in hopes to give our most passionate users a chance to sway the votes and outcome. We’re going to put the top games of the year in a bracket and have them face off over the course of December.

What games do you want to see in the Deku GotY brackets?

We’re going to create a bracket of 64 games. Half of those games are already determined – we took the 32 most wishlisted and collected games from across all consoles and put them in the list below. However, we’d love your help by nominating games for the other 32 open slots.

Any game that was released on at least one platform in 2023 and isn’t in the list below is eligible for nomination. Maybe you’re super passionate about a game that didn’t get the recognition it deserved, or flourished in a genre that doesn’t get enough attention, or even a game that isn’t listed on Deku Deals (yet).

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To nominate a game, please fill out this form

Nominations close at noon Pacific time on Saturday, December 9th

What happens next?

Starting on Monday, December 11th, we’ll have games face off in two-day Discord emoji battles. The game that gets the most emojis advances to the next round. We’ll break ties by advancing the game that had the lowest sale price in 2023 (this is Deku Deals, after all).

To participate, you'll need to join our Discord.

What was that about prizes?!

At the conclusion of the bracket challenge, each person who voted at least once in each round will be entered into a drawing for $25 of credit to the eShop of their choice. Likewise, each person who nominated at least one game will be entered into a drawing for $50 of credit to the eShop of their choice. Finally, if one of the user-nominated games wins the tourney, we’ll also have a separate drawing between the user(s) who nominated it for $100 of store credit.

Which games are already in the tournament?

We've pre-selected our most wishlisted and most collected games of 2023. These are already in the tourney so there's no need to re-nominate them, and nominations for these games aren't eligible for the nomination prize drawings: