The Game Awards have struggled at times to maintain the gaming and esports community’s respect, and with blunders like these, you can see why. Rémy “XTQZZZ” Quoniam’s nomination for Best Esports Coach of 2023 raised many eyebrows and forced the man himself to beg to be taken off the nominees’ shortlist.
With the end of the calendar year comes the time to rate the best and worst of 2023. The Game Awards have tried to assert authority as the place to go for everything gaming and esports come the end of the year, but it’s hard to take the award show seriously when it can’t get even the most obvious nominees right.
Such is the case with XTQZZZ’s nomination for Best Esports Coach. The French Counter-Strike 2 coach has practiced his craft for all of two months during the entirety of 2023 and hasn’t won a single trophy this year. His nomination is so out of place that XTQZZZ pleaded to The Game Awards to take him off the list, stating “he wasn’t even a coach this year.”
The community is equally baffled by the nomination and has come up with a funny and scarily plausible theory—The Game Awards panel simply googled which team won the CS:GO Major in 2023 and just nominated their coach. XTQZZZ is currently coaching BLAST Paris Major Champions Vitality, but he was not the one to lead the team to victory in Paris. That honor goes to Danny “zonic” Sørensen, now at Falcons.
The wild card here is that zonic is also nominated for Best Esports Coach of 2023, which makes the selection of XTQZZZ even harder to explain. The CS community’s theory may be a bit disrespectful but it at least provides some sort of explanation. Having both zonic and XTQZZZ among the nominees just makes it seem like The Game Awards were picking names at random out of a hat.
The other three names that were picked via this scientific method are Evil Geniuses’ Christine “Potter” Chi, Florida Mayhem’s Jordan “Gunba” Graham, and JD Gaming’s Yoon “Homme” Sung-Young.
This leaves CS2 as the only game that provides two nominees to the Best Esports Coach category at The Game Awards. As much as we’d like to celebrate that achievement, even XTQZZZ knows that it shouldn’t be the case, or at the very least not with the current nominees.
Whether The Game Awards will recognize the French coach’s demand to be taken off the shortlist remains to be seen. The Game Awards show kicks off on Thursday, Dec. 7.
