At the heart of the industry’s anxiety is a simple truth: discovery. Amid consolidation, towering profit mandates, precarious labor conditions, the spread of AI, platform volatility, changing tastes, and the occasional baffling release like Bubsy 4D, the thing that most reliably saves studios and creators is the rare, catalytic moment of breakthrough.
That’s why I’m more invested in awards now than ever.
We’re deep into Game of the Year season: the stretch when players who don’t spend every hour in the same handful of free-to-play shooters finally work through backlogs, argue craft, and confront the reality that they can’t play everything. There will be exhaustive roundups, and inevitably someone will cry “you missed X.” A loose consensus — shaped by media, creators, and fans — crystallizes at The Game Awards. (Industry peers contribute their picks at next year’s DICE Awards and the GDC Awards.)
Those honors are mostly celebratory — there’s no definitive right answer for what constitutes the year’s best — but they matter more than they used to. Any vote for a “game of the year,” whether it’s the marquee GOTY at The Game Awards or “Best Puzzle Game” on a forum ballot, can create a visibility bump. A modest, ambitious adventure that slipped under most radars at launch can find a second life when it’s named alongside heavily marketed blockbusters. When Neva showed up on a Game Awards ballot last year, I watched people flock to read reviews who hadn’t heard of it before.
Historically, the awards ecosystem has struggled to represent the full breadth of releases. The barrier to honoring everything is enormous — nearly 19,000 games were released on Steam in 2024 — and The Game Awards nominated just 74 titles across new releases, live-service entries, mobile, and VR. When popularity, discoverability, and discourse steer what people play, no single awards scaffold can fairly showcase an entire year’s output. Still, acknowledging that limitation is the first step toward improvement.
Earlier this month the Golden Joystick Awards — one of the oldest ceremonies in gaming — revealed its nominees. The headline contenders are there: large, polished blockbusters and splashy indies that traveled with AAA momentum. But scan the categories and you’ll notice a lot of familiar names repeating. For example, two different open-world titles set in feudal Japan — Ghost of Yōtei and Assassin’s Creed Shadows — both landed in “Best Visual Design.”
As Kotaku’s Ethan Gach put it in a Bluesky post I keep thinking about, “If I was constructing a 2026 GOTY in a lab, it would be a Sony open world RPG with turn-based hybrid combat, companion relationships, and RNG-heavy roguelite progression that leans into gambling mechanics and has light city sim base building.” That quip underlines how a formula has emerged for what looks like a GOTY contender. Games that deviate in form or spirit — those with structural oddities or brief runtimes — often get boxed into smaller genre categories despite their artistry.
That predictability has consequences. Consider Sonic Racing: Crossworlds, which sits only a few Metacritic points below the likes of Death Stranding 2 and Ghosts of Yōtei. Does it crack a top-10 GOTY list? Probably not. Will it win Best Racing Game? Almost certainly. The same logic puts obstacles in the path of titles that might deserve recognition beyond narrow genre labels.
How high must the bar be for a fighting game like Street Fighter 6 to earn GOTY acknowledgment? Can voters see Gabe Cuzzillo’s anxious humor in Baby Steps, Alex Jordan’s shape-shifting work in The Alters, or Adrian Vaughan’s haunted narration in The Drifter as the year’s best performances regardless of studio sheen? Does a compact, two-hour experience like Despelote have “enough” story to merit Best Narrative? (And seriously, should there be a Best Documentary category for games?)
Recurring favorites across media and fan ballots reveal a system that gravitates toward a certain playstyle or those indies that make the loudest splash. That doesn’t help an industry that depends on players stumbling into something unexpected.
Hollywood offers instructive precedents. The Oscars once rewarded a narrow kind of prestige filmmaking — think The English Patient or A Beautiful Mind — but over time the conversation broadened. The #OscarsSoWhite reckoning expanded the Academy’s composition, the decline of the mid-budget prestige film created space for outfits like A24 and Neon, and the Best Picture slot expansion in 2009 opened opportunities for riskier, smaller films. That evolution helped nominees like Moonlight and Parasite get their moment.
The Academy’s recent internal reforms also nudge voters toward due diligence: in an update earlier this year, members must now watch all nominated films in a category to be eligible to cast a final-round ballot. That sounds obvious, but it’s a meaningful step toward ensuring informed voting.
A similar mandate for game awards would be onerous — and unrealistic for fan-driven polls — but the principle stands: doing the homework matters. Abstaining when you haven’t experienced a nominee is a better look than guessing. Listen to experts, lean on trusted curators, and champion your own oddball choices. I’ll be rooting for Megabonk as my personal GOTY pick regardless of broader consensus.
Graphic: Polygon | Source images: Team Cherry, Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive, Nintendo, Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment
There’s a cultural gap between people who treat awards season as a discovery engine and those who see the whole exercise as theater. Film has a dense ecosystem of organizations — from AFI and Gotham to critics’ circles and craft guilds — that each surface different movies and broaden the conversation. Gaming has fewer comparable touchpoints. BAFTA and GDC’s indie awards matter, and the New York Videogame Critics Circle is doing important work, but we need more institutions and more voices to complicate the narrative between now and The Game Awards. If critics and curators amplify under-the-radar work, that amplifies discovery for everyone. Read their lists. Talk about them. Support them.
This isn’t a lecture; Polygon is guilty of the same groupthink that afflicts the rest of the industry. We grind to experience as much as possible every year, but we’re not immune to converging on a few obvious candidates — I’d be unsurprised if Silksong ended up on many end-of-year lists. Still, consider this a call to action: voting in GOTY polls can tangibly shift a game’s fortunes. Curiosity resists the AAA echo chamber. Be unpredictable. Nominate the quiet, the strange, and the brief. Consider titles like The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Battlefield 6, Lies of P: Overture, Rematch, Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, Lumines Arise, and Marvel Rivals across categories — and if someone names Clair Obscur as their number one, that’s great too. Make your lists, celebrate the left-field picks, and imagine a world where distinctive taste becomes the next valuable franchise.
Source: Polygon
