Any game that is a port of a 360 game is automatically not included, why would you vote for a game that is made for technology specs 5 years old.
Any game that takes less then 3 hrs to finish should be disallowed, why would you vote/include a game that costs you $25-$30/hr to play.
Any game that requires you to wait for 3 years and purchase ' the next instalment in the series', to what what should take one solid,proper game to do it, ( see the might and magic series 1-9 for an example of a real game series.. not to be confused with the piss poor ' heroes of might and magic' ), should be out; Why would you nominate a company and game series that is nothing more then a money grab. ( DOW II , Starcraft II ..)
Just my thoughts on the criteria.
Perhaps I should change the name of this to mean that Game of the Year, means the GOTY Editions of games that we can pick up that come with all the expansions and/or DLC. See this thread came about because last year it was cool to hate on DLC and so I started a thread that would overt that and get the "real game" (the one that should have come out in the first place).