The feat of discovering a new thing remains the gaming industry’s greatest existential threat. Even in the anxiety-inducing age of corporate consolidation, escalating profit expectations, labor perils, the widespread use of AI, platform turmoil, shifting generational tastes, and Bubsy 4D, salvation all kinda comes back to the dark magic of “breaking through.”
Which is why I’m more invested in “awards” than ever.
With only a few weeks left in the calendar, we’re firmly in Game of the Year season, a time when the minority of gamers who aren’t playing the same six free-to-play shooters each week play through their backlogs, debate the craft, and realize that even they won’t get to everything. There will be exhaustive best-of lists, and there will be “but you forgot!” reactions to those lists. A player consensus-ish voted on by media, influencers, and fans will be issued at The Game Awards. (Industry artisans weigh in next year at the 2026 DICE Awards and GDC Awards.)
All that sanctification is in good fun — there are no right or wrong answers when it comes to naming the best games of the year — but the stakes do feel higher. Any vote cast for a “game of the year,” be it for the grand GOTY prize at TGAs or “Best Puzzle Game” in ResetEra’s forum-voted awards, opens a door for a breakthrough moment. A mid-sized adventure that flew under the radar at launch could suddenly find new life by rubbing shoulders with more recognizable (i.e. heavily marketed) big boys. When last year’s Neva popped up in the running for a Game Award, I know for a fact that tons of people suddenly wanted to read a review of Neva.
Traditionally, the GOTY machine has made little room for the breadth of releases published each year. The hurdle to clear to consider it all feels like climbing Everest; nearly 19,000 games were released on Steam in 2024, while only 74 titles — from new releases and ongoing games to mobile and VR exclusives — were represented across the The Game Awards nominees. When popularity, discourse, and platform discoverability drive what people play each year, there’s simply no way for the scaffolding of accolades to do justice to a year’s worth of games. Still, there’s room for improvement, if we can acknowledge it matters.
Earlier this month, the Golden Joystick Awards, one of video games’ longest-running awards ceremonies, announced its nominees. While the vote for Game of the Year proper happens early next month, you can already see where it’s going: This year’s list made room for rightful contenders — massive titles that have earned praise for polish and scope, hit indies welcomed with AAA-scale hype — but across a wide range of categories, there’s a noticeable concentration of repeat names. Across the vast sea of art and play styles, the “Best Visual Design” makes room for two different open-world games set in ancient Japan: Ghost of Yōtei and Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
“If I was constructing a 2026 GOTY in a lab,” Kotaku’s Ethan Gach wrote in a Bluesky post that I am still chuckling over, “it would be a Sony open world RPG with turn-based hybrid combat, companion relationships, and RNG-heavy roguelite progression that leans into gambling mechanics and has light city sim base building.”
GOTY voting, in all of its formal and informal iterations, has become predictable. Years of nominees and winners has birthed a formula for what type of polished 30-plus-hour game can score a Game of the Year nominee. There are games that never break into GOTY or even “major” crafts categories like Direction or Narrative, thanks often to formal ingenuity and quirkier mechanics. Most games published in a year are destined to be ghettoized into genre categories.
Hypothetical: Will Sonic Racing: Crossworlds, a game with a Metacritic score just a few points shy of Death Stranding 2 and Ghosts of Yōtei, crack the top 10 of The Game Awards’ Game of the Year category? Or even one for best soundtrack (because the music absolutely rips and deserves it)? Probably not. Best Racing Game? Sure thing.
How good does Street Fighter 6 need to be to earn Game of the Year appreciation? Can voters look at Gabe Cuzzillo’s anxiety-spiral comedy stylings in Baby Steps, Alex Jordan as all those Jans in The Alters, or Adrian Vaughan’s tormented noir voiceover in The Drifter and see the best performances of the year without a studio-franchise sheen? Does Despelote’s two-hour play time have “enough” story to warrant a (deserved) Best Narrative honor? (Also, does The Game Awards need a Best Documentary category?)
Overlap in favorites throughout the years — on the media level, on the fan level — reveals a system increasingly skewed toward a certain time-consuming style of game, or indies that landed with enough of a splash to check the box. Not great for an industry where discovery is everything.
How do you fix that? Hollywood may have a few lessons from which the gaming industry could crib. Over the past few decades, the Oscars evolved from the era of The English Patient and A Beautiful Mind — when prestige dramas were practically engineered in a lab for awards voters — into a ceremony willing to crown movies like Moonlight and Parasite. That shift came with big changes inside and outside the Academy: a more diverse, international voting body after the #OscarsSoWhite reckoning, and the collapse of the old mid-budget prestige economy that made room for studios like A24, Neon, and Netflix to run the awards table. The expansion of the Best Picture category to 10 nominees in 2009 helped, too, giving smaller and weirder films a shot at the top prize.
In recent years, the Academy vote — whether consciously or through the cultural pressure campaigns waged through awards season — has gotten better at spreading the wealth instead of letting one movie sweep the night. Even in a year dominated by Oppenheimer, voters still found space to honor Anatomy of a Fall and American Fiction in the screenplay categories. It’s a system that’s found ways to balance crowd-pleasers and curveballs, the kind of calibration that the gaming industry’s own awards scene, still in its blockbuster era, hasn’t quite nailed down yet.
The only way to really engineer a diversity of winners — and, in effect, create a greater platform for discovery — is to widen the fields, widen the voter base, hold voters to high standards, and empower taste. That said, that’s exactly what the Academy of Arts and Sciences continues to do in its mission to support a flailing industry; in a surprise oh they didn’t already do that? update to its bylaws issued earlier this year, the Oscars org declared that “Academy members must now watch all nominated films in each category to be eligible to vote in the final round for the Oscars.”
A similar requirement would be challenging for any game awards organization and, let’s face it, entirely unfeasible at the fan level. But there’s something to be said about doing the homework — or abstaining when you haven’t. Deferring to people who have. Investing in the opinions of others. Investing in your own quirky picks: I’ll be beating a drum for Megabonk as GOTY until the end of the year whether anyone thinks it’s “good enough” or not.
Having traversed many a comment section, there’s a wide chasm between movie people who huff Oscar talk as they anticipate a new season of Great Films, seeing the discourse as that gateway to discovery, and gamers who don’t understand why anyone (mostly us) would waste time thinking about Blue Prince’s chances at besting the odds and becoming a Game of the Year winner. If anything, the space might need more saber-rattling, and more appreciation of those out there celebrating games.
The weeks leading up to the Oscars are filled with organizations that have decided it’s culturally important for them to proclaim the best films of the year. The American Film Institute, the National Board of Review, the Broadcast Film Critics Association (aka Critics’ Choice Awards), the Gotham Awards, The New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Circle, the Indie Spirit Awards, and craft guilds like the WGA, PGA, DGA, and SAG-AFTRA all crack the conversation with their own unique scope and taste. (Even AARP’s “Movies for Grownups Awards” have thrown a few curveballs in their day.) Each announcement shakes up “the race,” but even better, exposes cinephiles around the country to a bunch of movies they may have deprioritized over the so-called front-runners.
The gaming equivalents are rare: BAFTA continues to walk its own line, GDC has its indie awards companion, but nothing between now and The Game Awards really complicates the conversation. I admire the New York Videogame Critics Circle for collecting itself and vying to make a splash each January. The landscape could use more of that energy, if only to make each proclamation a little more influential. Critically, culturally minded curators shouldn’t wait for official organizations to deem their opinions worthy: make noise. And if you appreciate those champions making noise, read their lists, and make more noise on their behalf.
None of this is meant as finger-wagging over hivemind thinking. Polygon is prone to the same monolithic thinking on “what’s good” and the human limits of consideration. (We hustle like mad over many months to experience all that developers have put forth this year, but I would be surprised if we didn’t come to a conclusion that Silksong was Really Great.) But now is a good time for a call to action. Critics, influencers, enthusiasts should know that an action as simple as voting in a GOTY poll can move the needle on a commercial level. Curiosity is a counter to the AAA death spiral. Let’s get unpredictable. Let’s consider not just indie hits, but The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Battlefield 6, Lies of P: Overture, Rematch, Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, Lumines Arise, and Marvel Rivals in all categories. Someone will name Clair Obscur #1, and that’s cool too. So make your lists, revel in the left-field picks, and imagine a world in which good taste is the next bankable IP.
