To assume this to be true, one must assume the awards are given without merit based entirely on the self promotion of the company(s) involved. I do not see this to be the case. You must also presume the judges are not truly interested in quality and that the voting public is either ill-informed or easily swayed by the fact that companies announce their nominations after the fact. I don't see either of those to be the case either.
No, you've misinterpreted my post.
The main
value of the ENnie awards is to the companies whose products are nominated and recognised with awards. They are the only people who benefit in any real way, by having interest raised and by increasing their general prestige in the industry.
Compared to this, the
value to the customer/gamer/fan is vanishingly small. Stack up "I might be made aware of a game I didn't know about before or check out one I was on the fence about" against the potential for increased sales and awareness, being able to describe a game as "award-winning" in ad copy,
et cetera - it's no contest.
Even if a company encourages their fans to vote, for the fans to vote they must care enough about either the company or its products. The act of attracting fans is itself something of a quality test: does a company produce material that causes people to care.
This is wrong and I can prove it with graphs, but two words will suffice:
Palladium Books.
Furthermore, the company sending material to the judges also informs us the company itself cares about its reputation and the quality of its products. They are going to be sending in their best stuff. A company could send all of the junk they wanted to the judges but if its no good, the judges, I trust will recognize that fact and, if I was a judge, I would be turned off by a glut of bad material coming from a company.
You're still misinterpreting what I said.
Yes, companies are motivated to send their best stuff in, because they hope to be nominated or to win awards. Of course, their reasons for doing that are the same as their reasons for producing good games in the first place, and so the extent to which they succeed at the latter will influence how well they succeed at the former.
I'm not accusing the ENnies of being completely blind to quality. The whole reason there are multiple judges is to sort the wheat from the chaff. The fact is, however, that
of the products which are nominated the choice of winners is a straight popularity contest - you can't draw any direct conclusions about quality from the final results. That's why you see people in this thread or a similar one on RPG.net declaring that they're more interested in the nominees than the winners; the winners are just the nominated products with the biggest fanbase, while the nominees are theoretically selected on the basis of quality (to the extent that it can be determined by the judging process) from all products submitted for consideration.
Even then, each individual person has to consider their own preferences and how they match up to those of the judges, the community, and the industry. To a lesser or greater extent there will always be differences. Even the most excited and enthusiastic
Pathfinder fan can probably name at least one or two supplements or adventures that disappointed them in some way despite being popular with the rest of the fan community.
