Paizo wins coveted “Better Website than Steve Jackson Games” Ennie Award
|by Leif Nelson | August 6, 2024
Members of Paizo’s leadership took to the GenCon stage last weekend to accept the “Better Website than Steve Jackson Games” Ennie award. “This has been some time coming,” said Jason Bulmahn, holding the trophy above his head. “Everyone at Paizo has been holding our breath since we redesigned the website back in 2018. To finally have our work recognized is a huge boost to us all, even if it took a few years before the judges were willing to look at it again.”
Ennie judges admitted that they had been lax in determining if Paizo’s website deserved the award. “We really only went to the website when we heard about the Starfinder Playtest,” said Cheryl Lee, one of the judges. According to Lee, the committee eventually elected to award the trophy to Paizo after determining that it was marginally easier for an RPG newcomer to buy a digital copy of Pathfinder than it was to figure out which edition of GURPS is the most up-to-date.
Lee says there’s a reason the award isn’t handed out very often. “It’s not always the easiest process to put our judges through. It takes a fair amount of mental fortitude to navigate the design of some publisher’s websites. And it also requires us to return to Steve Jackson Games site to compare the two, making sure to stay within doctor-recommended periods of exposure. I have it on good authority that SJG are planning on updating their website after they publish their final Munchkin supplement, so we only have a few decades before we have to find a new standard.”
After the Paizo team accepted the Ennie, they then waited 60 seconds for the awards committee to package it, and then were able to accept it again to take the trophy home.