Can Clair Obscur win the Big Five GOTY awards?

This coming Thursday, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is up for (and the favorite to win) yet another Game of the Year award at the DICE Awards in Las Vegas. It might seem like the 2025 GOTY narrative, and Clair Obscur’s dominance of it, has already wrapped up, but in fact, we’re only halfway through the annual game awards cycle. The three most significant industry-voted awards are yet to come: DICE, the Game Developers Choice Awards in March, and the BAFTA Game Awards in April.

This means Clair Obscur still has one summit of GOTY acclaim to climb. Can it win Game of the Year at all of what we’re calling the Big Five game awards ceremonies: the Golden Joystick Awards, The Game Awards, the DICE Awards, the GDC Awards, and BAFTA?

Even as dominant as Clair Obscur is, this particular feat will be extremely difficult to pull off; it’s only been done once before. This is because these five awards ceremonies have quite different voting bodies, and each has its peculiarities (especially the two British awards that bookend the season, the Golden Joysticks and BAFTA). To seal a Big Five sweep, a game needs to win over industry peers, critics and media, and the general public. It helps to run unopposed by heavyweight rivals, as Clair Obscur is, but even then, success is not guaranteed.

First, a quick rundown of the Big Five:

• The Golden Joystick Awards is first out of the gate in November of the release year, and its Ultimate Game of the Year award is voted on by fans.
• The Game Awards is by far the highest-profile and most influential ceremony. It runs in December, and is voted on by a global jury of critics from gaming sites like Polygon, plus mainstream media and a handful of influencers.
• The DICE Awards is held in the February following the release year at the DICE exec conference in Las Vegas. It’s voted on by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, an American industry body.
• The Game Developers Choice Awards happens in March during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It’s voted on by a panel of game industry creatives and trade journalists.
• The BAFTA Games Awards typically takes place in late March or April, and it’s voted on by expert panels assembled by BAFTA, the U.K.’s screen industry body.

With the different constituencies represented by these awards, it’s not too surprising that it’s rare for them all to go the same way. Nevertheless, the annual GOTY narrative is nothing if not consensus-driven, and has a tendency to coalesce around one outstanding game more often than not — as has happened with Clair Obscur.

Yet since the beginning of The Game Awards era in 2014, the Big Five have only chosen the same game of the year once. It was Baldur’s Gate 3, in 2023. This remains true even if you go all the way back to 2003, the first year The Game Awards’ predecessor, the Spike Video Game Awards, was held (and also the first BAFTA video game award ceremony). A Big Five sweep is incredibly, incredibly rare.

Image: Larian Studios

How come? It’s partly fate and the vagaries of the release schedule. It’s pretty common for two games that would be considered a dead cert in any other year to face off against each other and end up splitting these five awards bodies between them. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Half-Life 2 in 2004; Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption in 2010; Portal 2 and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim in 2011; Grand Theft Auto 5 and The Last of Us in 2013; The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 in 2015; The Last of Us Part 2 and Hades in 2020.

(Oddly enough, it has been Rockstar’s fate to end up in just such a clash-of-the-titans death match with every one of its major releases since 2003 — including in 2018, when God of War wiped the floor with Red Dead Redemption 2. Grand Theft Auto 6’s dominance of GOTY 2026 has been assumed, but might the same fate befall it? Prediction market odds on Fable are already creeping upward…)

Even when that doesn’t happen and there’s an overwhelming favorite with an apparently clear run, just one of the Big Five awards bodies can (and likely will) torpedo it. BAFTA, in particular, revels in its role as a last-minute disruptor at the end of the season. Its jury loves to go a different way to everyone else with left-field picks like Outer Wilds, Returnal, and, um, Tom Clany’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. In 2017, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s perfect run was wrecked when BAFTA swung in with What Remains of Edith Finch?, a low-budget indie family drama. It happened again in 2022: Elden Ring just kept winning until it suddenly didn’t, and BAFTA, with perfect comic timing, chose the gloriously braindead Vampire Survivors.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo

As the only public-voted award among the Five, the Golden Joysticks can also throw a cat amongst the pigeons. Don’t believe in the wisdom of crowds? Consider 2018, when God of War swept all the critics’ and industry awards, but Joysticks voters chose Fortnite. Both deserving winners, but one of these games became a global phenomenon and a multibillion-dollar industry in its own right that is still played by tens of millions of people today, and the other one is just a very good video game.

That’s not going to happen this time around; the Golden Joysticks already selected Clair Obscur as its Ultimate Game of the Year. It will be surprising if Sandfall Interactive’s game doesn’t win at DICE and GDC, too. But a comedy BAFTA combo-breaker is still very much in play, with Blue Prince a likely recipient, given the BAFTA jury’s form.

The final accolade might be beyond Clair Obscur’s reach after all. If it is, the Sandfall team shouldn’t feel too downcast. They’ll be in very good company.