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Most Game of the Year awards of all time
The Last of Us Part II holds the record in this archive with 325 Game of the Year awards from its 2020 season — 44 ahead of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and the only game here to pass 300. Below it, the top of the table is remarkably tight: four games separated by fewer than twenty awards.
A word on what this list is. It is not "the best games ever" and it is not a complete census of every award ever handed out. It is a count of how many separate media outlets, juries and reader polls named each game their overall Game of the Year, drawn from an archive that documented 6,547 such awards between 2003 and 2021. Games from 2022 onward are deliberately excluded from this ranking, because only a fraction of their awards are documented here — putting them in would make the table look complete when it is not.
Why the record is not simply "the most awarded game"
Elden Ring is reported to have won 435 Game of the Year awards for 2022, which is more than any figure on this page. That record is real and well documented — it is a Guinness World Record — but it comes from a different, larger count than the archive behind this table, and mixing the two would produce a ranking that means nothing. Where a third party has published a figure we cannot reproduce ourselves, we cite it on the year's own page rather than folding it into our numbers.
How to read a total honestly
The number of outlets handing out a Game of the Year grew from 38 in 2003 to 643 in 2020. A game that won 60 awards in 2008 beat almost everything in front of it; a game that won 60 in 2020 finished well down the field. That is why every entry here carries its year, and why the share column further down matters more than the raw count.
Read this first.
These totals are a documented minimum, not a complete count, and the number of outlets tracked grew enormously over the years. A 2005 total and a 2020 total are not the same currency — compare share instead, in the table below.
How the tracked field grew
This is the single most important chart on the site, because it explains why raw totals cannot be compared across years. In 2003 the archive recorded 38 Game of the Year awards. By 2020 it recorded 643. A game winning 60 awards in 2008 was dominating its field; a game winning 60 in 2020 was an also-ran.
Awards tracked that seasonThe winner's own total
The dashed line is the winner's own haul. Where the two lines move apart, the field grew faster than any single game could keep up with.
Every winner, and how dominant they were
- Awards
- How many separate outlets named this game their overall Game of the Year that season. One outlet, one award.
- Tracked
- How many GOTY awards we documented for that whole season, across every game. This grew from 38 in 2003 to 643 in 2020.
- Share
- Awards ÷ Tracked. The percentage of that season's awards the winner took — the only number that compares fairly across years.
Tap any column heading to sort the table.
| Year | Winner | Awards | Tracked | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | It Takes Two | 89 | 450 | 20% |
| 2020 | The Last of Us Part II | 325 | 651 | 50% |
| 2019 | Death Stranding | 118 | 472 | 25% |
| 2018 | God of War | 264 | 517 | 51% |
| 2017 | The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild | 265 | 462 | 57% |
| 2016 | Uncharted 4: A Thief's End | 191 | 482 | 40% |
| 2015 | The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt | 281 | 482 | 58% |
| 2014 | Dragon Age: Inquisition | 139 | 441 | 32% |
| 2013 | The Last of Us | 257 | 545 | 47% |
| 2012 | The Walking Dead: The Game | 75 | 401 | 19% |
| 2011 | The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim | 229 | 411 | 56% |
| 2010 | Red Dead Redemption | 112 | 304 | 37% |
| 2009 | Uncharted 2: Among Thieves | 116 | 226 | 51% |
| 2008 | Fallout 3 | 69 | 213 | 32% |
| 2007 | BioShock | 47 | 160 | 29% |
| 2006 | The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion | 41 | 115 | 36% |
| 2005 | Resident Evil 4 | 36 | 65 | 55% |
| 2004 | Half-Life 2 | 25 | 60 | 42% |
| 2003 | Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic | 18 | 40 | 45% |
Has any year produced a runaway winner?
Share is the fair comparison, and it tells a different story from the raw counts. The most dominant seasons in this archive are not the ones with the biggest numbers — they are the years where the industry simply agreed.
A share above 50% means more than half of everyone who handed out a Game of the Year award that season handed it to the same game. Below 30% means the year had no consensus at all, and whichever game you remember winning probably did win — somewhere.
So which game really won the most?
By raw count inside this archive: The Last of Us Part II, with 325. By share of its own season, the most dominant winners are the ones at the top of the share column above — and they are not the same games. By the largest published figure of any kind, Elden Ring's 435 awards for 2022 stands alone. All three answers are defensible; they simply answer different questions. Anyone giving you a single number without saying which question it answers is guessing.