The Game Awards 2025

The Game Awards 2025 was an award show to honor the best video games of 2025. It was the twelfth show hosted by Geoff Keighley, creator and producer of the Game Awards, and held with a live audience at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on December 11, 2025, and live streamed across online platforms globally. It featured presentations from celebrity guests including David Harbour, Dan Houser, Rahul Kohli, and Lenny Kravitz, and a musical performance from Evanescence.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 led the ceremony with thirteen nominations and nine wins, the most in the show's history, including Game of the Year, the first debut game to win. The Game Changer award honored Girls Make Games, an organization supporting young girls to pursue careers in the video game industry. Several new games were announced, including Control Resonant, Divinity, Mega Man: Dual Override, Tomb Raider: Catalyst, and Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic. The show was viewed by over 171 million streams, the most in its history, though responses were mixed.

Background

As with previous iterations of the Game Awards, the 2025 show was hosted and produced by Canadian games journalist Geoff Keighley. He returned as an executive producer alongside Kimmie Kim, while Richard Preuss returned as director, LeRoy Bennett as creative director, and Michael E. Peter as co-executive producer. Sydnee Goodman returned as host of the 30-minute preshow, titled Opening Act. The presentation took place at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on December 11, 2025. Public tickets became available for purchase on November 1. Keighley dedicated the show to his father, who died in August; an empty seat was reserved in his honor, beside Keighley's mother.

The event was live streamed across online platforms including TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as Amazon Prime Video for the first time. It was broadcast on a record number of platforms in China, including Bilibili, Huya Live, and Weibo. The Game Awards partnered with Amazon for the show, creating a dedicated store for merchandise, deals, and new reveals. The Twitch broadcast was streamed in 1440p for the first time. Like the 2024 show, the Future Class initiative—an annual list of 50 individuals from the industry who best represent its future, introduced in 2020—did not return in 2025, and the list of previous inductees was removed from the show's website.

Announcements

Keighley sought to balance time dedicated to announcements and awards, wanting to satisfy both sides of the audience; he felt the reveals attracted new viewers and boosted attention to the winners. His team worked directly with developers to prepare trailers and schedule them at specific points in the show to create an emotional arc for viewers. Most of the three-hour show was focused on announcements, with approximately 17 minutes dedicated to awards. According to Kotaku, publishers paid up to US$450,000 for a 60-second trailer and over $1 million for a three-minute slot. Forbes's Paul Tassi reported that Highguard's developer did not pay for its reveal; the show's producers scheduled it as the final trailer.

Preceding the Game Awards, several announcements were made during broadcasts by Wholesome Games on December 9, and Day of the Devs, the Latin American Games Showcase, and the Women-Led Games Showcase on December 10. A statue was placed in the Mojave Desert in late November to tease a reveal at the show, prompting wide speculation; based on trademark registrations, journalists solved that it was a new entry in the Divinity series. The statue was relocated to the Peacock Theater before the ceremony. The Control Resonant and Divinity reveals featured live theatrical elements, including performers on wires; preparation for the former began in March 2025. In addition to new footage from the upcoming films Street Fighter and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, announcements on released and upcoming games were made for:

New games announced included:

Of the new game announcements, Total War: Warhammer 40,000 received the most followers on Steam with 54,000, roughly the same as the combined total of the next three highest: Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis (20,000), Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve (18,000), and Control Resonant (16,000). Within a week, the Resident Evil Requiem trailer generated the most media coverage (approximately 1,740 articles, followed by Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic with 1,605 and Divinity with 1,357) and most social interaction on Facebook and Twitter (followed by Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, respectively), while the 2XKO trailer received the most views on YouTube (8 million), followed by Resident Evil Requiem (almost 6.5 million) and Marvel Rivals (5.2 million).

Winners and nominees

Nominees were announced on November 17, 2025; the Game of the Year nominees leaked a few hours before the official announcement. Any game released for public consumption on or before November 21 was eligible for consideration, including downloadable content (DLC), expansions, remakes, remasters, and seasonal content. The nominees were compiled by a jury panel composed of members from 154 media outlets globally—a 14% increase from 2024's 134, particularly from Europe and Latin America. Specialized juries decided nominees for categories like accessibility, adaptation, and esports. Winners are determined between the jury (90 percent) and public voting (10 percent); the latter was held via the official website and Discord server until December 10. The exception was the publicly-voted Players' Voice, for which voting opened on December 1. Millions of votes were cast within hours, causing website delays, which Keighley called "unprecedented"; 123 million votes were cast, a 10% increase from 2024. As with preceding years, a hub world was developed in Fortnite by Nighttimes and Evil Eye Pictures, allowing players and jury members to vote from November 21 for their favorite user-created islands among ten nominees; the winner was announced during the ceremony.

2025 marked the first year in which multiple Game of the Year nominees were independent games, representing a 50/50 split. They had sold a combined 22.3 million copies and each saw sales increases after their nominations. Three games—Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and Ghost of Yōtei—were nominated for all five major craft awards (Best Game Direction, Narrative, Art Direction, Score and Music, and Audio Design), and Expedition 33 was the second game to receive three nominations in a single category (Best Performance) after 2016's Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. Megabonk's Best Debut Indie Game nomination was removed on November 18 at the request of its developer, who felt he did not qualify as it was not his debut game; it was the first time a developer had willingly withdrawn a nomination and the second rescission overall, following the removal of two fangame nominations in 2016. It was subsequently nominated in the 30-game first round of Players' Voice.

The winners were announced during the awards ceremony on December 11, 2025. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won all but one of its jury-nominated awards, including Game of the Year and four of the major craft awards; it lost Best Audio Design to Battlefield 6 and the fan-voted Players' Voice to Wuthering Waves. It was the first debut and first French-developed Game of the Year winner, and the first to also be nominated in (and win) the indie game categories. Most of the 30-person development team, Sandfall Interactive, flew from France and bought tickets to attend the show, each dressed in traditional French marinière with red berets. The game's engagement tripled after the show, with its most successful sales day since May and most cumulative Steam players (57,000) since June; more than 300,000 copies were sold in the following five days. The game saw a 160% weekly increase in players on December 13, of whom 17% were new. Of the other winners, South of Midnight and No Man's Sky saw a 32% and 14% increase in daily active users on the following weekend.