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Readers vs critics
They do now — they really did not use to. Before 2013 the public and the press crowned different games 6 times. Since then it has happened exactly once: 2021 — the press backed It Takes Two, the readers voted Resident Evil Village.
The most-awarded game among media outlets against the most-awarded game in readers' and community polls. Rows marked split are the seasons the two camps disagreed — note where they cluster.
Readers' polls were a print-era institution with small, self-selected ballots — a few thousand magazine readers against dozens of editorial juries. As voting moved online and the panel grew, the readers' verdict converged on the critics' one. The share of readers' votes actually rose — 14.6% of all awards in 2003–2012, 24.1% since — yet the disagreement at the top all but vanished. More voters, less dissent.
Games whose award hauls lean hardest on the public vote. No game embodies it like Cyberpunk 2077: 72.1% of its 43 awards came from readers — the press largely passed on it, the players did not.
The mirror image: heavily awarded by juries and editorial boards, almost invisible in public polls. Control collected 36 awards and exactly 1 of them from readers.
Every award row in this database carries its vote type; where the original tracker published a media/readers split, those figures win over our own label detection — see the methodology.