Marvel’s Wolverine Set To End Sony’s Historic 11-Year GOTY Run

Reviews of Marvel’s Wolverine were published this week, and they’re on the lukewarm side. Currently, the Insomniac Games title sits at a middling 78 on Metacritic. Critics found its relentless combat action wears thin and were divided on the strength of its storytelling. Polygon’s review called it “the biggest disappointment of the PS5 era.”

This is a below-par result for both Insomniac and publisher Sony, and it means Wolverine is unlikely to score a nomination for Game of the Year at The Game Awards — even in a soft year like this one. Critical sentiment is the strongest barometer of success at The Game Awards, where the jury is mostly composed of international games media. There’s never been a game nominated with a Metascore below 80. What’s more, as a licensed game. Wolverine faces an additional hurdle. Properties originating outside games are rarely nominated at The Game Awards, with Insomniac’s own Spider-Man games among the rare exceptions.

But Wolverine missing a GOTY nomination would break a remarkable 11-year streak for Sony, which is by far the most successful publisher in Game Awards history.

The first year The Game Awards was held, in 2014, no Sony games were nominated for Game of the Year. (The big PlayStation exclusive that year was Infamous: Second Son — Metacritic rating: 80.) But that is the only time Sony hasn’t had at least one game nominated for GOTY.

In the 11 years since, Sony has maintained a flawless record. It has won Game of the Year three times (God of War in 2018, The Last of Us Part 2 in 2020, and Astro Bot in 2024) from an amazing 14 nominations. Just as impressively, there have been two Sony games among the six nominees on three separate occasions. The only other publisher to achieve this feat is Nintendo, which has managed it twice.

This record is a testament to Sony’s quality control, and also to its dedication to a kind of game that always overperforms at The Game Awards: cinematic action-adventures with high technical polish and serious, emotional storytelling. Sony has also scored nominations with the family-friendly Astro Bot and Ratchet & Clank, and with the more arcane Bloodborne. But the rest of its nominations make for a very single-minded roll call: Uncharted, The Last of Us, God of War, Horizon, Spider-Man, Death Stranding, Ghost of Tsushima.

Image: Sucker Punch Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment

More than any other publisher or developer, Sony embodies The Game Awards. The typical Sony game and the typical Game Awards GOTY contender are one and the same. But this link may be faltering. Sony’s most recent win was with 2024’s Astro Bot, a cheery platformer, and the GOTY field is increasingly learning toward deep role-playing games with distinctive, specialized styles like Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

It might be that Sony’s brand of action-adventure is finally falling out of fashion with critics and jury members. A common theme of Wolverine reviews was frustration with stagnating “Sony Game” tropes and Wolverine‘s narrow interpretation of them. But that doesn’t mean I’d bet against a nomination for God of War Laufey next year. The bigger issue with Wolverine is that, in this case, Sony and Insomniac’s grasp of what makes these games rich and satisfying slipped. A switch of game directors two years ago suggests both parties knew it wasn’t dialed in, but perhaps this realization came too late in development to fully change course.

With Wolverine almost certainly out of the running, Sony’s hope for a 2026 GOTY nomination now rests with Housemarque’s Saros. The intense sci-fi shooter has a much better critical reputation (87 on Metacritic). But it’s not very widely played and may be too much of an acquired taste, especially for a jury which rarely rewards pure action games. Housemarque’s Returnal wasn’t nominated in 2021, a historically weak GOTY year.

There’s also the huge reputational damage done by Sony’s decision to end production of physical PlayStation games to consider. I don’t think the jury would choose to punish individual games or Sony-owned developers based on this issue, but in a weaker year for the publisher’s output, it certainly doesn’t help.

It looks like Sony is out of the Game of the Year race for the first time since 2014. It’s just another way in which 2026 is a year the publisher will want to forget.