It deserved it to me.

GOW3 was boring in 1,5 weeks
batman was boring in 1 week
skyward sword was boring in 8 hours
dragon age 2 was boring in 42 hours.
MW3 was boring in 2 days
BF3 was boring in 2 weeks.

Skyrim was boring in 2 months

obvious winner is obvious. all games are is fun*time/retail price
skyrim was fun for 8 weeks and on a scale of 10 fun i would put at 6-8, and well.. lasted so long we all well got their moneys worth.

GOW3 was fun, but after the single player, and a few horde matches and some multiplayer it was boring.. might as well return it.

batman again was fun, but the important stuff was over in a few days.

MW3 was garbage and after the single player, and maybe a day of multiplayer fun the game was boring and deserved a trash compacter
BF3 didn't live up to BF2:MC but it was good and lasted a decent time.

this same stuff goes for other games
mass effect is great, for 3 days then you did it all= bad purchase

a game should at least last 60 hours until you are bored with it. skyrim lasts about 170 hours. everything else is was below 60, except BF3 which was 73.

Quality versus quantity ring a bell I personally thought Mass Effect 2 had more quality moments.

Yup.

As an example to our dismal gaming industry if nothing else.

Surely there are others who disagree with the media stamping Skyrim as Game of the Year.

I don't know about it being publically called GOTY, but it is my personal GOTY... and to me, that's all that matters.

Since I play PC games (2003) I have only 2 non sports game series that were on my computer desktop: ANNO and TES. that says alot about what I like but also about the quality og these series. Though I played other strategies than ANNO, TES is the only RPG that I played more or less thoroughly. I tried Dragon`s age or Mass Effect but didn`t catched me. Skyrim has some foults. For me, the most disturbing is lacking of non agressive quests. That`s what I liked in Oblivion. You could actually walk the world with some business to handle but without the need of fighting (or maybe I don`t corectly aproach Skyrim).

But still, open world, HUGE, insanely good looking, surprinsing and long lasting gameplay. for me, this is the game of the decade!

Yes, it does. It also deserves the good portion of criticism as it could've been much better hadn't they cut so many things that people got used to when playing a TES, but the game is still good for what one can expect in 2011 in this market.

Absolutely!

Skyrim is fantastic and although I loved several other games such as dark souls and dead space 2 they just cannot compare with the sheer size and wealth of replayability offered in skyim. The fact that I've put in over 300 hours and still am excited every time I play speaks for itself and I've not yet even touched the dark brotherhood - my favorite faction from oblivion.

No. Saint's Row the Third is a better RPG experience than Skyrim.

Shogun 2: Total War is my goty

Definitely yes, I haven't found any other 2011 game comparable to skyrim to be GOTY, the most close good game of 2011 I can think of is batman arkham city, so yeah for me the battle was between these two games, and skyrim wins.

Skyrim is one of the very very very few games that kept me attached for 5 playthroughs, over 500h+ gameplay and i have not quitted yet.
The witcher 2 i played for 5min and then i gave up because i dont like the third person cam(even though this game is rated very good). Not my type of game.
BF3 kept me awhile, but i got bored after a few weeks.
The other games i can think of that matches skyrim is oblivion, morrowind, dragon nest(the game is good but the company is BS...=.= ), fable 3, FF series and mass effect 2.

if u ask me if skyrim is to be goty, yes.

I agree. While it is a great game it could have been even better had it not been for the stupid release date. I don't mind waiting longer if it means a better game. I wish more companies followed Nintendo's 'it's ready when it's ready' approach to developing and testing. But rushing development to meet release dates so publishers can maximise profits seems to be the norm nowadays.

Skyrim is the only 2011 game Ive put ~200 hours into(counted), and will likely keep putting more into for years to come. So yes, its earned GotY from me.

No!! It didn't.
Broken game of the year

In the last year I have played a lot of shooters and started to despair at the lack of imagination poor story lines in sp and woeful online play. Then I picked up a copy of Skyrim and as far as I'm concerned its the best game I have played in a very long time. The only other game I put the same amount of time in to playing and enjoy every minute of it would be total war.

Thus far ive played about 250 hours of skyrim, and im not done yet. The only game i played more is oblivion, 400-ish hours. Deus ex lasted me 15 hours? or something like that.

Aside from oblivion and Skyrim, the only games that i played for more than 200 is pokemon and MW2. The only reason i played mw2 for that long was because of the amazing fun in challenging friends in splitsreen-mode.

And that's why Skyrim deserves GOTY

The pc and the 360 versions? Yeah, they deserved the game of the year. I understand my version (the ps3 version) svcks big time, but that's not the only version of the game and if any version is good enough to win GOTY then it should be a valid option for the same reason that amazing games like Bioshock got game of the year even when they weren't available on all platforms.

I would appreciate it if the GOTY had clarified that though. That the pc and 360 versions were what won the award, not the ps3 version. Legally, each version is considered to be a different game altogether. I see no reason why they can't specify versions if there are significant differences.

Perhaps given enough time to work on it, it could've been GotY 2012.

I don't think it deserves GotY 2011.

Did anybody watch the Oscars a few weeks ago? For "Best Original Song" there were 2, count 'em, 2 nominees. Both songs were from animated movies, and both pretty much svcked - but one of them won an Oscar for Best Song of 2011

true story
of course if there was another game that was clearly better than skyrim in 2011 it would've win, too bad there wasn't, this gives skyrim a well deserved GOTY

The PC version didn't deserve GOTY by the long shot and I thought Two Worlds 2 was technically much better, quests were much stronger and it doesn't hold your hand, since you have to find stuff yourself.

GOTY should have gone to The Witcher 2 but I guess it didn't get GOTY because it's not dumbed down enough for casual gamers.

yeah the witcher 2 is pretty cool, despite its linearity.
anyway, I think they picked a game that was available in all major platforms (pc, ps3 and xbox360)

A good game it judged on how good it is, not by how many platforms it runs on and smaller studios might have trouble with 3 platforms. Saying that, Two Worlds 2 is much better on the PC and they didn't destroy it by using some crappy joypad UI just because it's a multiplatform game.

Your opinion of Two Worlds is definitely not popularly held. And it certainly isn't held among reviewers, a number of whom referred to it as "Oblivion Lite".

And yet some reviewers gave it over 90% because of a good honest review. The game has a lot of solid RPG elements and it's done by a much lesser known company. Funny though, it's RPG elements are superior to Skyrim and it's not dumbed down either. Two Worlds is actually more open than Skyrim, since when you enter cities they are completely open, Skyrim and Oblivion are not because you have to wait for them to load evertime you enter or exit.

I also think that a smaller company that's able to make a new game engine and that technically beats Bethesda's poor excuse just shows. Bethesda clearly are taking their player base for a ride while the casual gamers couldn't care less.