It’s that time of year again — the Golden Joystick Awards 2025 have wrapped and The Game Awards are just weeks away, so voting season is in full swing as players push to get their favorite titles across the line.
Highly anticipated releases like Grand Theft Auto VI — which, much to fans’ frustration, recently suffered another delay — and The Witcher 4 were prominent in the ballots. Unsurprisingly, GTA VI claimed the “Most Wanted Game” prize at the Golden Joysticks, but CD Projekt Red’s new Witcher instalment was not far behind. The official Golden Joysticks account shared the vote breakdown in a thread summarizing the ceremony’s results.
Relative to the scale of GTA VI’s buzz, the gap was remarkably narrow. Rockstar’s upcoming release has been the industry’s biggest talking point — so much so that some developers have intentionally avoided launching projects near Rockstar’s planned 2026 window. As one observer put it previously, GTA VI can feel like “a black cloud that looms over everything.”
pic.twitter.com/uWjMTuP9RYNovember 26, 2025
Fans reacted with surprise at how tight the race was. One user wrote, “The Witcher 4 getting this close to GTA 6 is a big deal,” while another tersely observed, “It’s fucking GTA 6.” Personally, as an RPG enthusiast, I’m more excited for The Witcher 4 — it might not be Elder Scrolls 6, but among CD Projekt Red’s upcoming projects it’s arguably the most significant.
CD Projekt Red also has other cards in the pipeline, including the cryptically named Project Sirius — which the studio says will “differ from past productions” — and Cyberpunk 2. Between those projects and GTA VI, the next few years look set to be very busy for major publishers.
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