And the winners are:

Best Action Game - Batman Arkham City
Best Mobile - Angry Birds Space
Best downloadable game - Minecraft
Best Fighter - Mortal Kombat
Best Shooter - Battlefield 3
Best MMO - World of Tanks
Best Handheld - Uncharted
Best DLC - Portal 2
Best RPG - Skyrim
Best Sport - FIFA 12
Best Browser - Slender
Best Racer - Forza 4
Best strategy game - Civ V

The one to watch - GTA 5

Best Gaming moment - Skyrim: Throat of the World

Ultimate game of the year - Skyrim

BF3 won best shooter therefore beating better games like RO2 and Skyrim beat The Witcher 2 and Dark Souls :( (although its still great)
Goddamnit voters

And the results surprised... absolutely no one. >.> Out of those, I think I voted for Arkham, Minecraft, and... possibly Portal 2. I don't really remember.

laughable list

Are these voted for by users, or is there a jury that decides these things? If it is purely based on user votes, than the only one of those that is not completely obvious is the one for best DLC. More famous (and good)=More votes, its that simple.

Voted by users

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Joystick_Award

Wait, what?

It's 2012, why is that category even there, and what does it mean anyways?

Everything is shit.

I kind of had the same thought when I saw it...

anyway, and I forgot Strategy - Civ V

Skyrim as best rpg?

Must we have a 2011 game winning...well a 2012 award? It's not even a good rpg at that, and the Throat of the World, whilst nice looking, was barely the 'best gaming moment' of the year.

Couldn't a 2012 rpg win the award? Dragon's Dogma? Borderlands 2? Hell I'd even say Final Fantasy XIII-2 and I don't even like Final Fantasy.

Humm, is anybody actually paying attention to these awards? :)

I don't know - there are so many of them, they seem so interchangeable, and practically every AAA game will predictably obtain a number of awards to put on their cover. They don't seem to actually mean anything, so I ignore them.

I think it means all games released from this time last year until this time last year or something like that
Makes no sense to me either and 2012 games like CS:GO or Dragon's Dogma should be on a 2012 list instead
That said if 2011 games there why no TW2 or DS instead of TES :(

I kind of like the Golden Joystick award. It is the longest running gaming award (started in 83') and is voted by users. Like it or not, it is a not to bad barometer of the games last year. And yes, there is a kind of overlap in years.

Skyrim isn't an RPG, it has no stats. It's action adventure game, and a shitty buggy piece of shit at that.

Popularity contests to find "the best" of anything are doomed to failure because the unwashed masses have bad taste and always like whatever the gaming media etc tell them to like, so it's a contest of money and not a contest of good games. Skyrim had like a 60 million dollar budget and I would be willing to bet most of it was Bethesda marketing, putting giant posters of the Dragonborn on buildings (yes, literally) and ads and posters at every game store on the planet, plus the usual bribes and blowjobs to game journalists and reviewers to artificially hike the metacritic score up.

Eventually impressionable youths start believing it must be a good game (even if it's a piece of shit) because it seems like everyone, including their friends are playing it, the game is everywhere so they think "why am I not playing it?" and bow to peer pressure to buy it.

Everything needs to burn.

Ah, ok. :) I had honestly never heard of this award (perhaps it wasn't popular in Germany at the time when I was still paying attention to awards), so I assumed that it was just one more award in this endless string of golden plaques that seem to exist only to fill space on game box covers. ;)

But it seems that the Golden Joystick is indeed an institution. I'd still say that it's a measure of a games popularity rather than quality, but I can understand the interest in it.

Also, the Golden Joystick has just risen in my respect, after I found out that they awarded "The Hobbit", one of the most audacious (and today probably most underrated) text adventures ever. That it received the Golden Joystick for _Strategy Games_ is a bit funny, though. ;)