During The Game Awards 2022, the final two rounds of the Players' Voice award (the only award of the show to be determined entirely by the public) were effectively a toss-up between the top 2 games: Genshin Impact and Sonic Frontiers. Unexpectedly, fans of both games became highly adversarial, accusing each other of bribery and vote rigging by using bots, and facetiously perpetuating their opposition's claims to inflate the controversy. Some accused voters for Genshin Impact of rigging the results under the belief that they would receive in-game currency should it win, something that had previously occurred after the game won the award for Best Mobile Game in 2021, while others noted a sharp increase of thousands of votes for Sonic Frontiers among other games in the API data on The Game Awards' website after the controversy gained steam. Despite this, there was no credible evidence of bots or bribery on either side, and host Geoff Keighley assured that his team would investigate the matter. The brigading and online arguing became noticeably popular on Reddit, to the point that the subreddit r/SonicTheHedgehog had to restrict any posts related to the controversy. In the end, Genshin Impact won the award. Keighley jokingly referenced the incident during the event, and all Genshin Impact players received free Primogems as a result, though tensions remained high between the two fandoms after the event. Keighley noted that the whole thing reaffirmed the show's decision to not allow fully-public voting for its main categories.