With The Game Awards behind us, prizes still await Expedition 33 at the DICE Awards, IGF Awards, GDC Awards, and BAFTA Games Awards.
The gaming awards season is upside down. In movie world, a carefully paced stream of precursor awards — handed out by critics’ bodies, trade guilds, and whoever it is that votes for the Golden Globes now — builds up through the early months of the year to the big climax: the Oscars.
In gaming, we climax first and do the rest later. The Game Awards, voted for by critics and unquestionably the main event, comes first (or almost first, after the Golden Joystick Awards) in December. The early months of the following year then see a succession of follow-up awards ceremonies trying to find ways to distinguish themselves from TGAs — or not.
This means that Clair Obscur’s GOTY 2025 victory lap is not yet over. In all likelihood, developer Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive have one or two more foregone-conclusion triumphs to look forward to. But there are also some opportunities for other awards ceremonies to go a different way and highlight different winners.
Here’s a breakdown of the awards ceremonies still on the horizon, along with some predictions of where they might go. DICE Awards (Feb. 12)
Although The Game Awards has cemented its reputation as “gaming’s Oscars,” the closest analog to the Oscars is actually the DICE Awards. That’s because the DICE Awards are voted on not by critics and media, but by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences — a professional organization of video game industry developers and executives, just like the movie Academy. The awards ceremony takes place during the DICE Summit, an exec-heavy industry conference in Las Vegas.
The DICE Awards tend to hew pretty close to The Game Awards, picking the same Game of the Year more often than not. The jury’s taste is similarly mainstream, but less international, and it can occasionally embrace indie winners.
