Is this where one might comment on a recent episode? Because I'm 3/4 of the way through the Charlies episode and I have some thoughts. :-)
The first thought is that I think the longer format lets the thing breathe a lot more. (The only reason why I didn't finish the episode yet is that it was past my bedtime.)
The second thought is that I should be taking umbrage at "Hollandspiele hipsters" but, you know, we're very much that band that no one has heard of burning CDs in our garage, so I guess that's fair.
We had two nominations this year - Brave Little Belgium and Escape From Hades. I'm happy for the design teams in both cases, of course, and was rooting for them, but I also knew they weren't gonna win. To be clear, this isn't sour grapes or anything - we are after all that band no one's heard of burning CDs in their garage, we ain't gonna win a grammy. The Hades nom made sense to me in that it's not like there are a whole bunch of sci-fi/fantasy board wargames out there, just as it made sense that there was no way Dune wasn't going to win it, despite the fact that Dune came out before I was born.
BLB -- it's a charming little game, and I think it achieves everything it sets out to do. Those aims are rather modest though. Again, this is by design; it's meant to be a streamlined scrappy little intro wargame made with love and craftmanship, not anything definitive or innovative or galvanic. If there was a category for Intro Wargame or Gateway Wargame, I could see it filling that sort of niche really well. But it getting a nom in the category it did is a little like living in some alternate universe where Gregory's Girl got nominated for Best Picture. Don't get me wrong, I adore Gregory's Girl, it's a very sweet and winning little picture, and maybe I'd prefer it to watching Chariots of Fire (which won) or Raiders of the Last Ark (I know, I know, heresy), but it's not Best Picture material. This isn't a qualitative judgement (as in, "this thing isn't as good as the others") or rather, it's an acknowledgement that the things have different qualities - it's apples and oranges.
So, while I was very happy to see the nom for BLB, and very happy for the designers, I also thought it was a little weird, and frankly might have a little more to do with Ryan "getting out the vote" so to speak during the nomination stage - he's very good at that kind of thing. And, just like the BGG Golden Geek Awards, it is 100% a popularity contest, and I'm not sure how useful that is as a metric. (I also don't know if that's how it was ran previously, or if there was some kind of board making these decisions way back when.)
Prevailing wisdom is that awards can help drive sales - nominees get a sales bump, and the winners get a bigger sales bump. I can say however that BLB and Escape From Hades didn't get any appreciable increase in traffic as a result of these nominations. Neither have our games that have been nominated for BGG Golden Geeks. Now, when An Infamous Traffic was nominated for Heavy Cardboard's Golden Elephant award in 2017, that did move the needle quite a bit - gave the game a huge jolt in the arm, and increased the audience for all of our wares more generally. But that wasn't a popular vote - the nominees and the award itself were decided by two or three people, and i think it gave the whole thing the imprimatur of discernment and taste.
Whether the lack of needle-moving for our Charlie noms is because of its popular vote nature, or whether it's because this iteration of the Charlies doesn't have quite the luster it had before - and certainly the U-Boot sweep doesn't increase that luster - I can't say.
I think, as the panelists alluded to, that the categories were over-broad. In fact, I know people were telling them when the awards were announced, "these categories are too broad, split them up!" and they just kinda dug in and said "this is how it's always been done, we're not going to change it" which I think is about as dumb as it sounds. Again, to be very clear, I'm not saying this because I think it would increase the chances of us getting noms or getting wins, because there's no way in heck we're ever gonna win something. We toil in obscurity on purpose and by choice, and part of that obscurity is not getting mainstream awards or acclaim. If I'm making weird experimental little films, they're not getting Oscar nods. But for folks and companies who do care about these sorts of things, these categories are ridiculous and a disservice.