Clair Obscur has won more GOTY awards than Elden Ring

According to one number-cruncher, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 now has more individual Game of the Year awards than any other game in history — even Elden Ring.

ResetEra member Angie recently posted a fascinating bit of data analysis, claiming that Sandfall Interactive’s RPG now has a staggering 436 individual GOTY awards — a tally that includes Game of Year titles decided by individual publications (like Polygon) as well as award show wins.

This has edged Clair Obscur ahead of 2022’s consensus masterpiece Elden Ring, which holds 435 such titles — and Clair Obscur still has more opportunities to win in an awards season that isn’t done yet.

Clair Obscur also now has more players’ choice or readers’ choice GOTY awards than any other game, with 125 to The Last of Us Part 2’s 115.

It’s an amazing feat from the French team in its debut game. However, Angie also shows that there’s one GOTY record that Clair Obscur will never be able to claim. In fact, it’s pretty unlikely that any other game will be able to beat it, ever.

Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time won an incredible 87% of the GOTY awards given out in the year of its release, 1998. Clair Obscur is third in this list, tied with Elden Ring on 70%. 1991’s Street Fighter 2 (80%) is the second-most-awarded game by this metric.

There’s a reason no game is ever likely to take Ocarina’s crown: the huge inflation in the number of GOTY awards given out each year over the past three decades. Ocarina’s 1998 release came just before the internet publishing boom started in earnest. According to Angie, five years later, in 2003, there were 40 GOTY awards. By 2011, there were over 400. For games released in 2024, there were 529. In 2025, the total is 621 and counting.

Image: Nintendo EAD/Nintendo

Claiming more than 70% of such a huge and diverse group of awards seems highly statistically unlikely now. The fact that Clair Obscur reached that level at all is a clear marker of its cultural dominance. (That and the fact that its closest competitor among 2025 games, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, has just 38 GOTY titles to its name.)

But it’s equally fitting that, in its own way, Ocarina of Time’s solid-gold status can never be surpassed. Back when there was such a thing as a gaming monoculture, it was almost unanimously acclaimed as the best game around. And who would argue?