After much anticipation, the nominees for the 2025 Game Awards are here. While the coveted Game of the Year category doesn’t feature any surprise nominations, those GOTY noms mark a surprising first in The Game Awards history. The 2025 field set a record for how many indie games are up for the top prize, claiming a solid half of the six slots for the Game of the Year award.
Nominated for Game of the Year are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Donkey Kong Bananza, Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. All three indies — Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hades 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong — are also nominated for Best Independent Game, meaning this is the first time more than one game has gotten a nod in both categories from the jury, let alone three.
The Game Awards have been around since 2014, and only five games in the show’s history had previously been nominated in both the GOTY and Best Independent categories (2016’s Inside, 2018’s Celeste, 2020’s Hades, 2022’s Stray, and 2024’s Balatro). Three indies nabbing a GOTY nob in one year is quite the sizable jump, and speaks to how much these games dominated conversations throughout the year.
While none of the previously nominated indie games won GOTY, they all took home the award for Best Independent Game in their respective years. The same won’t be able to be said about at least one of Expedition 33, Hades 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong; even if one wins GOTY and another wins Best Independent, the third would be left out in the cold.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 may have the look and length of a AAA blockbuster, but it was made by a comparatively small team started by ex-Ubisoft developers and has been the GOTY frontrunner since its April launch. It and its cast have received 12 TGA nominations, a record for the most in The Game Awards’ history. Three of the game’s nominations are for Best Performance (with Jennifer English, Ben Starr, and Charlie Cox getting nominations for their work), so pulling off a sweep at The Game Awards is technically impossible, but don’t be surprised if Expedition 33 sets a record for most wins at the award show.
After a long, long wait, Silksong finally arrived in September with just two weeks’ notice. Its launch created waves in the indie scene, spurring other publishers to delay their games out of its way. As a result, some of those games ended up in the splash zone of Hades 2, which rode a wave of positive reception in early access to a polished 1.0 launch just weeks after Silksong dropped.
In many ways, 2025 was primed for indie games to wrestle the spotlight away from their AAA counterparts. In an environment when publishers are trying to raise prices of games past $70 to $80 — all in the middle of a cost of living crisis — the $20 Silksong, $30 Hades 2, and even the $50 Expedition 33 are all inherently more accessible. They all also came out in the year Grand Theft Auto 6 didn’t, as Rockstar’s next crime epic is now due out late 2026 (we’ll see about that). The absence of GTA left a vacuum other publishers raced to fill, but none of fall’s big releases (like Silent Hill f, Ghost of Yōtei, or The Outer Worlds 2) were able to capture the zeitgeist in the way Sandfall’s, Team Cherry’s, and Supergiant’s hits did.
All three of these games, and their fellow nominees in the GOTY category, have also been nominated in a plethora of other categories and will have chances to bring home multiple pieces of hardware. The Game Awards airs Thursday, Dec. 11, at 7:30 p.m. EST/4:30 p.m. PST.
