The Game of the Year race has reached its tipping point. While we’ve had a clear-cut field of nominees for the bulk of 2025, September threw several wrenches into the conversation. With Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades 2, Ghost of Yōtei, and even Silent Hill f emerging as possible contenders at The Game Awards, at least one highly acclaimed game is going to miss the cut without an expansion of the field of nominees. If you’re looking at games on the chopping block, Blue Prince’s chances may be looking dire right now.
But Blue Prince isn’t suddenly in danger of missing the cut; its chances were never very good to begin with. That has nothing to do with the actual quality of the game, but with a facet of Game Awards voting that makes it hard for small games to compete on the same level as blockbusters.
Blue Prince is a wholly unique game. The first-person puzzle adventure throws players into an ever-evolving manor on the hunt for a secret room. The longer players venture into the manor, the more they realize that every single corner of it is densely filled with clues. To uncover some of its deeper mysteries, players will have to decode some clever wordplay that hinges on an understanding of the English language. It’s a game that’s frankly impossible to translate to another language without significantly overhauling a core piece of its design to suit each individual language. And because of that, it’s only playable in English.
That decision leaves Blue Prince with a limited audience — and that’s a big problem in the context of The Game Awards. As part of the show’s voting methodology, nominees are decided by a large pool of 100+ gaming outlets. While that includes a large minority of English-language publications, it’s also a very international jury. Publications from China, Mexico, Brazil, and more are represented. That’s a sound move. In theory, it ensures that the nominees aren’t just made up of games that appeal to Western critics’ tastes. Maybe that’s how we ended up getting Black Myth: Wukong in the final Game of the Year field last year despite its relatively humble critical reception.
The flipside, though, is that it creates a roadblock for something like Blue Prince. If a significant percentage of the jury isn’t able to play a game, how can it possibly gather the votes it needs to fight for top honors? There’s a case to be made that this is fair. If we’re determining the best game of the year at a global level, perhaps a language barrier is a reasonable blocker. (As an added wrinkle, Blue Prince is still inaccessible for colorblind players, though developer Dogubomb says it plans to address that in a patch.)
But that edge case reveals a larger issue within The Game Awards’ structure: It’s not a friendly show for smaller games made with limited resources. The composition of the jury benefits games that have the budget to be localized into as many languages as possible. That skews the odds in the favor of big productions from major studios. Independent games, on the other hand, have a harder time keeping up with that unless they come from an already successful studio, aren’t reliant on text, or are backed by a major indie publisher like Devolver or Annapurna Interactive (both of which have had success at the show historically). That explains how something like 1000xResist, a critically celebrated game that’s only playable in a few languages, can win a Peabody and rack up nominations at the Hugo and Nebula Awards, but get shut out of The Game Awards entirely.
It’s a problem that lacks an easy solution. The deck is stacked against small games as is, but ditching international voters wouldn’t be fair either. The only thing you can do is accept that The Game Awards is as flawed as any awards institution. It is constructed to celebrate a certain type of game. You can even glean that from its choice of categories, which skews towards traditional blockbuster genres like action-adventure, but leaves out others like puzzle games that tend to skew indie. It’s a show built to honor big zeitgeist games with mass international appeal.
Blue Prince simply isn’t a game that falls into the show’s sweet spot, but that doesn’t mean it’ll get shut out entirely. There’s still a good chance that it will get its flowers in a field like Best Debut Indie Game that isn’t quite as competitive and requires less of a consensus to land in. But if you’re betting the farm on it fighting for the big prize alongside Silksong, call your bookie as soon as possible and move your dark-horse gamble to Silent Hill f.
