HALF MAN, HALF MACHINE, ALL LINDERMANN.

I don't know if this is as widespread knowledge as it should be, but Jeff Gerstmann on The Jeff Gerstmann Show has laid out how the awards of The Game Awards work. The Game Awards is essentially an aggregate critics choice awards across 100 or so worldwide video game press outlets and influencers (including Jeff Gerstmann. The jury fills out a ballot of nominations across the categories. They can nominate up to five, they are encouraged to nominate none if they are not comfortable nominating anything in a category (e.g. the influencer/outlet didn't play enough sports games, esports awards are nominated by a specialized group). The nominees are tallied by the TGA production company. If a category doesn't have enough nominees, that category is dropped. Once the nominations are finalized, a ballot to pick one winner is sent out to that 100+ jury.

The timeframe for all this seems to typically be a few weeks in November. That might explain a recency bias towards Alan Wake II.

So with the "Dave The Diver" being called an indie game... you can chalk that up to a majority of video game critics/journalists/influencers not looking too closely at a video game and just voting on vibes. Not a good look, but I'll forgive it given the shitshow it seems to be a generalist video game critic/etc.