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Reach or intensity: what an award total hides
A Game of the Year total tells you how many outlets picked a game. It does not tell you where. In 2020, The Last of Us Part II won 324 awards across 47 countries — but two games behind it prove that the same total can describe two completely different kinds of success.
The measure below is awards per country. A low number means a game picked up a vote almost everywhere it was tracked; a high number means a handful of markets did the heavy lifting. Neither is better. They are different achievements, and a single column of totals flattens them into one.
Every 2020 game with six awards or more
| Game | Awards | Countries | Regions | Awards per country | Biggest region's share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Last of Us Part II | 324 | 47 | 10 | 6.9 | 24% |
| Ghost of Tsushima | 75 | 32 | 9 | 2.3 | 33% |
| Hades | 74 | 19 | 9 | 3.9 | 45% |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | 40 | 13 | 5 | 3.1 | 60% |
| Final Fantasy VII Remake | 37 | 15 | 9 | 2.5 | 43% |
| Animal Crossing: New Horizons | 32 | 16 | 7 | 2.0 | 47% |
| Doom Eternal | 14 | 9 | 6 | 1.6 | 29% |
| Half Life: Alyx | 14 | 8 | 6 | 1.8 | 29% |
| Assassin's Creed Valhalla | 6 | 6 | 4 | 1.0 | 50% |
| Yakuza: Like a Dragon | 6 | 5 | 3 | 1.2 | 33% |
Two caveats on this table.
Awards credited to a language or a multi-country region rather than a country are excluded here, so totals can sit one or two below the headline figure on the year page. And our coverage is uneven — the United States supplies roughly a fifth of all 2020 awards — so a high concentration in North America partly reflects where the archive looked hardest, not only where a game was loved.
It happens in most seasons, not just this one
2020 is the clearest illustration, not the only case. Across every complete season, these are the pairs where two games finished on effectively the same award total and one of them reached far more of the world:
| Season | Concentrated | Awards | Countries | Widespread | Awards | Countries | Reach ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception | 20 | 5 | The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword | 20 | 12 | ×2.4 |
| 2012 | Dishonored | 52 | 11 | Far Cry 3 | 53 | 24 | ×2.2 |
| 2020 | Hades | 74 | 19 | Ghost of Tsushima | 75 | 32 | ×1.7 |
| 2014 | Super Smash Bros. | 28 | 11 | Far Cry 4 | 28 | 18 | ×1.6 |
| 2012 | Borderlands 2 | 28 | 8 | Assassin's Creed III | 26 | 13 | ×1.6 |
| 2016 | Final Fantasy XV | 13 | 6 | INSIDE | 14 | 9 | ×1.5 |
Both games in every pair come from the same season.
That is not tidiness, it is the only way the comparison holds: the tracked field grew from a handful of countries to 59, so a game from 2006 could not have reached thirty countries — nobody was counting thirty. Comparing a concentrated old winner with a widespread recent one would measure the growth of the panel and call it taste.
Updated 2 October 2026 · Source: the Meta Awards database, where every award row cites where it was published.