The best games that never won Game of the Year

One game, 179 awards, no title

Red Dead Redemption 2 holds a record nobody wants. In 2018 it was named Game of the Year by 179 separate outlets — 34.6% of everything handed out that season — and finished behind God of War, who took 51.1%.

That is not a near miss. It is a landslide that happened to land on somebody else in the same year.

Why second place keeps getting bigger

Read the season column against how the tracked field grew, because that is the panel talking rather than the games. The 2025 season alone holds 765 awards from 683 outlets in 59 countries; the early seasons of this database hold a fraction of that. A runner-up now loses in front of an audience that did not exist when the record starts.

The number that shows how far this goes: 12 of the 23 complete seasons in this database were won by a game that collected fewer awards than Red Dead Redemption 2 collected while losing.

Read that as a statement about the panel, not about the games. It does not mean Red Dead Redemption 2 would have won those seasons — it could not have; they were different years with different fields and a fraction of the voters. It means a raw award total is worthless as a comparison between one season and another, which is why every cross-year figure on this site is a share instead.

What a season with a strong loser actually tells you

A big runner-up is a signal about the season, not a consolation. It means the field split between two games that a large part of the industry could each defend, and it is the mirror image of a divisive year, where the vote scattered across a dozen titles and nobody cleared the room.

Across the 23 comparable seasons, the median winner takes 42.9% of the awards. The most lopsided season on record is 2022, when Elden Ring took 72.3%. In a year like that the runner-up total is small because there was nothing to argue about. The seasons that produce a record-setting loser are the ones where two games were genuinely fighting.

How this list is counted

Three rules decide who appears above, and each of them removes candidates:

• Only complete seasons count. A season we can only document partially has no meaningful second place — where the whole record is four awards, the runner-up is one outlet. Those seasons are excluded here, as they are from every cross-year comparison.
• "Never won" means never, not "not this time". A game is only eligible if it has never topped any season in this database, so a studio's earlier winner cannot slip in on a later game's losing year.
• Every award has a source. These are documented minimums. The real totals are higher, and a game whose losing campaign was recorded in more places will rank above one whose wasn't — which is a limit of the record, not a finding about the games.

The full method, including what does not count as a Game of the Year award at all, is in the methodology. Every game above has its own page listing which outlets voted for it and where that is documented.