Seasons
Who won Game of the Year — and how clearly?
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took the 2025 season with 71.1% of every award handed out. Whether that is a landslide depends on what a normal year looks like.
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The short answer
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won the 2025 season with 544 of 765 awards — 71.1% of everything handed out that year. Second place, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, finished 496 awards behind.
That is the number. The more useful question is whether it was a clear decision or a narrow one, and for that you need to know what an ordinary year looks like.
What a normal winner looks like
Across the 23 seasons this database counts as complete, the median winning share is 42.9%. So a typical Game of the Year does not sweep: it takes a little under half of the awards, and the rest scatter across a dozen other games.
Measured against that yardstick, 2025 sits above the middle at 71.1%.
The extremes are further out than most people expect:
- The most one-sided season on record is 2022, when Elden Ring took 72.3% of everything.
- The tightest was 2007, decided by a handful of awards.
A share is the only figure that survives comparison between seasons. The tracked field grew from a few dozen outlets to 683 in 2025, so a winner with 300 awards today and one with 100 awards fifteen years ago may have won their year by exactly the same margin.
The full 2025 field
42 different games won at least one Game of the Year award in 2025, from outlets in 59 countries. These are the ten that took the most:
| Game | Awards |
|---|---|
| Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 | 544 |
| Kingdom Come: Deliverance II | 48 |
| Hollow Knight: Silksong | 24 |
| Donkey Kong Bananza | 20 |
| Blue Prince | 18 |
| Death Stranding 2: On the Beach | 16 |
| Hades II | 15 |
| Ghost of Yōtei | 10 |
| Dispatch | 10 |
| Silent Hill f | 9 |
How to read any of these numbers
Three things worth knowing before quoting a total anywhere:
- Every count here is a documented minimum, not a census. It is the number of awards we can point at a source for. The real figure is higher, and unknowably so.
- Raw totals do not compare across years. A season with 765 tracked awards and one with a tenth of that are different measuring instruments. Use share.
- A readers' poll and an editorial pick both count as one award. They are marked differently, but neither outranks the other — a magazine's staff and its audience each get one vote in these totals.
The whole method, including what does not count as a Game of the Year award, is written up in the methodology. If you want the all-time picture rather than one season, the record page tracks the most-awarded games ever.