All the awards Expedition 33 still has left to win — and the awards it won’t

The gaming awards season is upside down. In movie world, a carefully paced stream of precursor awards — handed out by critics’ bodies, trade guilds, and whoever it is that votes for the Golden Globes now — builds up through the early months of the year to the big climax: the Oscars.

In gaming, we climax first and do the rest later. The Game Awards, voted for by critics and unquestionably the main event, comes first (or almost first, after the Golden Joystick Awards) in December. The early months of the following year then see a succession of follow-up awards ceremonies trying to find ways to distinguish themselves from TGAs — or not.

This means that Clair Obscur’s GOTY 2025 victory lap is not yet over. In all likelihood, developer Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive have one or two more foregone-conclusion triumphs to look forward to. But there are also some opportunities for other awards ceremonies to go a different way and highlight different winners.

Here’s a breakdown of the awards ceremonies still on the horizon, along with some predictions of where they might go.

DICE Awards (Feb. 12)

Although The Game Awards has cemented its reputation as “gaming’s Oscars,” the closest analog to the Oscars is actually the DICE Awards. That’s because the DICE Awards are voted on not by critics and media, but by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences — a professional organization of video game industry developers and executives, just like the movie Academy. The awards ceremony takes place during the DICE Summit, an exec-heavy industry conference in Las Vegas.

The DICE Awards tend to hew pretty close to The Game Awards, picking the same Game of the Year more often than not. The jury’s taste is similarly mainstream, but less international, and it can occasionally embrace indie winners. (Journey, Hades, and Untitled Goose Game are all former GOTY recipients at DICE.)

This year, Clair Obscur and Ghost of Yōtei lead the DICE nominations with eight apiece. Elsewhere the GOTY nominees differ from The Game Awards, with Dispatch, Arc Raiders, and Blue Prince nominated. (If TGA has a weakness, it’s that it runs so early in the season that late-breaking hits like Arc Raiders and Dispatch can be under-represented.) Still, a Clair Obscur win in GOTY and several other categories seems likely.

IGF Awards (March 11)

Image: Gabe Cuzzillo/Maxi Boch/Bennett Foddy/Devolver Digital

Part of the Independent Games Festival, which is itself part of the Game Developers Conference (sorry, the GDC Festival of Gaming), the IGF Awards is by far the most iconoclastic awards ceremony in gaming, and it’s indie to the core. You won’t catch the IGF Awards nominating a big production like Clair Obscur — or rescinding its awards over genAI use, for that matter.

The IGF Awards committee goes through hundreds of individual submissions to draw up its shortlists, and it doesn’t take commercial releases into account. That means nominees can encompass games that came out a year previously and games that aren’t due out for months or have no release planned at all. It’s a great place to discover new stuff.

With Clair Obscur out of the way, Baby Steps leads the field this year with five nominations. But the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, IGF’s GOTY equivalent, could really go any way; you could just as easily picture a win for interactive TV mystery Blippo+, banned horror game Horses, or one of the other nominees you’ve not heard of yet, but soon will.

GDC Awards (March 12)

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

Also taking place at the GDC Festival of Gaming, the Game Developers Choice Awards are much more mainstream than the IGF Awards. They’re voted on by a panel of game industry creatives as well as the editors of Game Developer, a trade publication.

Like the DICE Awards, the GDC Awards often go the same way as The Game Awards — often, but not always. In recent years, they’ve been notably more inclined to pick a consensus-backed indie game as Game of the Year over a bigger, more commercial production: Balatro and Inscryption are two recent winners.

Nevertheless, Clair Obscur, straddling the worlds of indie and AAA as it does, is once again the hot favorite at the GDC Awards. It’s nominated in eight categories, ahead of Ghost of Yōtei, Blue Prince, Donkey Kong Bananza, and Split Fiction. (It’s notable that the likes of Death Stranding 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 look much weaker at DICE and GDC than they did at The Game Awards, perhaps due to juries that aren’t quite as international.) Clair Obscur will probably win here, too.

BAFTA Games Awards (April 17)

Image: Dogubomb/Raw Fury

Despite running almost ludicrously late in the year, the BAFTA Games Awards are worth paying attention to. In the U.K., the British Academy of Film and Television Arts moved relatively early on to integrate the game industry in its membership, and the nominations and awards are decided by a complex process involving specialist jury panels. BAFTA works in arcane and slow ways, but there’s genuine expertise deployed, and it shows.

In its Best Game category, BAFTA often diverges from the Game Awards and returns winners no other award ceremony would pick, like Outer Wilds, Returnal, or Vampire Survivors. Its level of British bias is tolerably low (there’s a British Game category for that). BAFTA may be late, but it’s reliably interesting, if not chaotic.

We don’t yet know the BAFTA Games Awards nominees; they’ll be announced on March 12. But BAFTA has published its longlist, and narrowed the Best Game category down to just 10 hopefuls. There’s nothing hugely surprising among these 10, and yes, Clair Obscur is there. But if there’s one awards body that will give its Game of the Year prize to Blue Prince, it’s this one.