The Game Awards 2025: what the winners and audience totals actually measure

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Game of the Year at The Game Awards in December 2025, along with honors including direction, narrative, art direction and Jennifer English’s performance. The official results also recognized Battlefield 6 for audio design and Doom: The Dark Ages for accessibility. Those outcomes concern named categories; a single overall award does not replace the more specific judgments. ^[1]

The December 11 show took place at Los Angeles’ Peacock Theater. A week later, the organizer reported an estimated 171 million global streams of the full broadcast, compared with 154 million in 2024. It said the 2025 total excluded Prime Video and did not count associated clips and trailers. The stated unit is streams. Recasting it as 171 million distinct people would claim something the release does not establish. ^[2]

The organizer separately reported more than 123 million authenticated audience votes, including Players’ Voice, and described distribution across numerous platforms and co-streaming channels. These are different measurements. Broadcast reach describes how the program circulated; a vote total records participation in awards voting. Neither figure, by itself, tells a reader how many people voted for a particular winner. ^[2]

The result list makes that distinction visible. Wuthering Waves won Players’ Voice, while Clair Obscur took the overall game award. No Man’s Sky received Best Ongoing and Baldur’s Gate 3 received Best Community Support. The categories give continued work on existing games a place alongside new releases, and they should be named when citing an award as a reason to explore a title. ^[1]

For readers looking ahead, the organizer’s current 2026 FAQ describes a 90-percent jury and 10-percent public blend for winners, with nominations chosen by a global group of media and influencer outlets and specialized juries in some fields. That is the rule page available now, rather than a recovered copy of the 2025 rules. It provides a useful check against describing the overall awards as a simple public poll. ^[3]

The same FAQ says live-service updates, expansions and remakes can be considered for their new creative and technical work. Readers comparing awards across years should therefore check the category, the edition’s eligibility dates and the work being recognized. A title appearing in more than one year’s awards does not, on its own, mean the same unchanged release has been rewarded twice. ^[3]

About this item: Retrospective report. No first-hand reporting or independent testing is claimed. Corrections policy.