With The Game Awards behind us, prizes still await Expedition 33 at the DICE Awards, IGF Awards, GDC Awards, and BAFTA Games Awards.<\/b>
\nThe gaming awards season is upside down. In movie world, a carefully paced stream of precursor awards \u2014 handed out by critics\u2019 bodies, trade guilds, and whoever it is that votes for the Golden Globes now \u2014 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 \u2014 or not.
This means that Clair Obscur\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cgaming\u2019s Oscars,\u201d the closest analog to the Oscars is actually the DICE Awards. That\u2019s because the DICE Awards are voted on not by critics and media, but by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences \u2014 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\u2019s taste is similarly mainstream, but less international, and it can occasionally embrace indie winners. (Journey, Hades, and Untitled Goose Game are all former GOTY recipients at DICE.)
This year, Clair Obscur and Ghost of Y\u014dtei lead the DICE nominations with eight apiece. Elsewhere the GOTY nominees differ from The Game Awards, with Dispatch, Arc Raiders, and Blue Prince nominated. (If TGA has a weakness, it\u2019s that it runs so early in the season that late-breaking hits like Arc Raiders and Dispatch can be under-represented.) Still, a Clair Obscur win in GOTY and several other categories seems likely. IGF Awards (March 11)
Part of the Independent Games Festival, which is itself part of the Game Developers Conference (sorry, the GDC Festival of Gaming), the IGF Awards is by far the most iconoclastic awards ceremony in gaming, and it\u2019s indie to the core. You won\u2019t catch the IGF Awards nominating a big production like Clair Obscur \u2014 or rescinding its awards over genAI use, for that matter.
The IGF Awards committee goes through hundreds of individual submissions to draw up its shortlists, and it doesn\u2019t take commercial releases into account. That means nominees can encompass games that came out a year previously and games that aren\u2019t due out for months or have no release planned at all. It\u2019s a great place to discover new stuff.
With Clair Obscur out of the way, Baby Steps leads the field this year with five nominations. But the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, IGF\u2019s GOTY equivalent, could really go any way; you could just as easily picture a win for interactive TV mystery Blippo+, banned horror game Horses, or one of the other nominees you\u2019ve not heard of yet, but soon will. GDC Awards (March 12)
Also taking place at the GDC Festival of Gaming, the Game Developers Choice Awards are much more mainstream than the IGF Awards. They\u2019re voted on by a panel of game industry creatives as well as the editors of Game Developer, a trade publication.
Like the DICE Awards, the GDC Awards often go the same way as The Game Awards \u2014 often, but not always. In recent years, they\u2019ve been notably more inclined to pick a consensus-backed indie game as Game of the Year over a bigger, more commercial production: Balatro and Inscryption are two recent winners.
Nevertheless, Clair Obscur, straddling the worlds of indie and AAA as it does, is once again the hot favorite at the GDC Awards. It\u2019s nominated in eight categories, ahead of Ghost of Y\u014dtei, Blue Prince, Donkey Kong Bananza, and Split Fiction. (It\u2019s notable that the likes of Death Stranding 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 look much weaker at DICE and GDC than they did at The Game Awards, perhaps due to juries that aren\u2019t quite as international.) Clair Obscur will probably win here, too. BAFTA Games Awards (April 17)
Despite running almost ludicrously late in the year, the BAFTA Games Awards are worth paying attention to. In the U.K., the British Academy of Film and Television Arts moved relatively early on to integrate the game industry in its membership, and the nominations and awards are decided by a complex process involving specialist jury panels. BAFTA works in arcane and slow ways, but there\u2019s genuine expertise deployed, and it shows.
In its Best Game category, BAFTA often diverges from the Game Awards and returns winners no other award ceremony would pick, like Outer Wilds, Returnal, or Vampire Survivors. Its level of British bias is tolerably low (there\u2019s a British Game category for that). BAFTA may be late, but it\u2019s reliably interesting, if not chaotic.
We don\u2019t yet know the BAFTA Games Awards nominees; they\u2019ll be announced on March 12. But BAFTA has published its longlist, and narrowed the Best Game category down to just 10 hopefuls. There\u2019s nothing hugely surprising among these 10, and yes, Clair Obscur is there. But if there\u2019s one awards body that will give its Game of the Year prize to Blue Prince, it\u2019s this one.<\/p>\n