The final winners of the 27th Annual Golden Joysticks have just been announced at the London-based ceremony, and Runescape studio Jagex has
been named as the Game Developer of the Year.

It’s a surprise victory for the often-underappreciated developer, whose browser-based MMO is in reality one of the most successful games on the
planet.

The ceremony’s two big victors were Bethesda’s Fallout 3 and Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: World at War.

Both title’s managed to scoop two awards – in Fallout 3’s case it captured the PC Game of the Year gong and the coveted Ultimate Game of the Year
title. World at War won the Nintendo Game of the Year and MSN Multiplayer Game of the Year categories.

Here’s the complete list of winners:

Nitro Family Game of the Year
LittleBigPlanet

Bliss Handheld Game of the Year
GTA: Chinatown Wars (DS)

Retailer of the Year
GAME

Mobile Game of the Year
Metal Gear Solid: Touch

Nintendo Game of the Year
Call of Duty: World at War

MSN Multiplayer Game of the Year
Call of Duty: World at War

Rampage Soundtrack of the Year
Guitar Hero: World Tour

Xbox Game of the Year
Gears of War 2

PC Game of the Year
Fallout 3

Amiqus Game Developer of the Year
Jagex

PlayStation Game of the Year
Killzone 2

Publisher of the Year
Activision Blizzard

Online Game of the Year
Left 4 Dead

ShortList One to Watch
Modern Warfare II

Ultimate Game of the Year
Fallout 3

Cambridge-based Jagex scooped the UK Developer Of The Year award, beating competition from Rockstar North, Lionhead, Codemasters and Media Molecule. The studio behind Runescape says its casual MMO is the world’s largest free online game with more than ten million registered users. Jagex was also recently named one of the fastest-growing private technology companies in the UK.

The surprise winner of the day was arguably Jagex, which secured the Game Developer of the Year award – perhaps a long overdue acknowledgement of its casual online achievements.

There was some tough competition this year from the likes of Lionhead Studios and Rockstar North, but, in the end, Jagex was voted as the UK Games Developer of the Year.

We’d like to thank everybody who voted for us – we couldn’t have achieved this without the support of our players. We’ll continue to work hard and do all we can to try to live up to this prestigious award.

Many thanks to you all!

Mod MMG and Andrew

03-Nov-2009 - Golden Joystick Awards – Thank You

Finally, the hangover from winning the UK Games Developer of the Year award at the Golden Joysticks on Friday is lifting, albeit slowly. :)

It wouldn’t be right to celebrate this incredible, humbling achievement without expressing our sincerest thanks and appreciation to the entire Jagex community for helping make this landmark achievement a reality. We have never seen so many people simultaneously spit their champagne at each other as when Jagex was announced as the winner! It was truly a vision that will make me smile forever. =D

This award was indeed special as not only was there some really tough competition, but this is one of the only awards voted for by the players themselves rather than an industry “old boys' club”. This year, over 1.2 million votes were cast, ensuring a World Record in itself for the Golden Joystick Awards as the biggest ever player-voted competition, and I would like to believe that most of those votes came from you, our epically sized community, not to mention the small fact that you managed to crash their website four times with all your votes!

The Jagex development team have worked tirelessly over the last eight years, their only concern creating great content for our players and games that we wanted to play ourselves – all totally under the radar of the traditional games industry and press. So while it is nice to be recognised so publicly by the industry (no doubt they will all be thinking about developing online games of their own), I would like to give everyone the assurance that our focus will remain on building great games for our community, and that we’ll continue to work hard and do all we can to try to live up to this prestigious award.

So, once again, many thanks to you all! The credit goes to our much-loved players and we hope that our entire Jagex community will share in the success along with the team at Jagex. A big cheers to all the players!

Mod MMG & Andrew

they only won because they told everyone to vote for them. I bet 100 million F2p noobs went and voted for them.... whoever has the largest fanbase wins!