Every year, we see the PlayStation Awards take place, and winners have just been announced from the Japan/Asia region. It was renamed this year as The PlayStation Partner Awards.
Final Fantasy VII Remake, which was a critical and commercial success by Japanese developer Square Enix, was one of 12 games to receive awards.
The PlayStation Partner Awards are very different from something like The Game Awards, which mostly rely on critical opinion and/or fan voting to name a winner in each category. These awards are based around sales numbers.
The main award given out at this event is The Grand Award. It names the three games with the highest worldwide sales within a one year period that stretches from October 2019 to September 2020.
One of those winners was Final Fantasy VII Remake.
The big win was confirmed by producer Yoshinori Kitase, who took a short break from designing the second installment of the Remake to congratulate his team on this accomplishment.
Another game to net The Grand Award was eFootball PES 2020. This is a soccer title that saw great success while the soccer industry was crippled due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
The other winner was Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, the hybrid open world RPG fighting game that explores the story of the original anime series by Akira Toriyama.
The Partner Award is another category, and it is given out to games that were developed in Japan and Asia that have high worldwide sales along with noteworthy “activity results.”
What constitutes those activity results is determined by Sony. It includes sales along with other stats like number of players.
This award was given out to seven different games, including Resident Evil 3, Black Desert, Mobile Suit Gundam: Battle Operation 2, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Nioh 2, Persona 5 Royal, and Final Fantasy XIV.
Then there were two Special Awards given out.
First up was an award for the game developed outside of Japan/Asia that had the highest sales in the region. This was awarded to Apex Legends. Respawn accepted the award with the promise of exciting updates coming soon.
There was also an award given for the title developed by a Japanese or Asian developer in conjunction with Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios that received the highest worldwide sales numbers. This was inevitably Death Stranding, by the legendary Hideo Kojima.
“The PlayStation Awards have been held every year since the birth of the PlayStation platform in 1994, celebrating its 25th anniversary last year,” Sony said on the PlayStation Blog. “This year, we’re giving the event a new name, the PlayStation Partner Awards, and adding some new awards to look forward to.”
