How many Game of the Year awards are there?

The short answer

3,360 distinct outlets have handed out at least one Game of the Year award in the record this site keeps — magazines, websites, juries, academies and readers' polls, across 100 countries and the seasons from 1990 to 2025.

In the 2025 season alone, 680 of them did. Season by season, across every year tracked at full breadth:

That is the number nobody publishes. Ask the question anywhere else and the answer is "dozens", followed by a list of five ceremonies.

Why "dozens" is the usual answer

Because the five are the only ones with a permanent institution behind them. Everybody can name The Game Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the BAFTA Games Awards, the Game Developers Choice Awards and the Golden Joysticks. They have websites, press offices and archives.

The other several thousand are a German site's editorial pick, an Italian magazine's readers' poll, a Brazilian YouTube channel's end-of-year video. Each one is a real Game of the Year award, given by people who played the games and argued about them. None of them is on a list anywhere, because keeping that list is work nobody had done.

• 436 outlets is the median size of a tracked season.
• 1,901 outlets appear exactly once and are never seen again — 1,901 of 3,360, more than half the field.
• Only 213 have voted across a decade or more.

The number is large and unstable. A Game of the Year award is not a scarce institutional honour handed out by a committee; it is what happens when a few thousand publications each decide, separately, what the year was about.

So which one counts?

All of them count once, which is the entire premise here. That is a deliberate choice and it has a consequence worth stating plainly: on this site The Game Awards and a two-person Czech blog carry the same weight, one award each.

If you want the opposite view — which ceremony is the one to watch — that is measurable rather than arguable, and it is on the awards page: how often each big ceremony's pick turns out to be the game the whole field ended up rewarding. The Game Awards matched the field in 83.3% of the 12 census seasons it has judged. The Golden Joysticks, decided by public vote, did in 30%. How each of them is decided is its own question.

Agreement is not the same as authority, though. A ceremony that always picks the consensus tells you nothing you could not get by counting; the ones that diverge are the ones carrying information.

How the count is built, and what it is not

Three things to know before quoting any figure on this site.

• It is a documented minimum, never a census. Every row has a source. Awards that were given but never written down anywhere we can reach are not in it, and there are certainly many — the entire 1990s leaves 22 awards.
• The field grew enormously. 2003 holds 42 outlets, 2025 holds 680. Raw totals across seasons compare the measuring instrument, not the games, which is why every cross-year figure here is a share.
• A platform award is not a Game of the Year. When one outlet hands out a PC and a console award side by side, neither is its overall pick and neither is counted. A single-platform magazine's award is its overall pick and is counted.

The full rules are in the methodology. Every outlet in the count has its own page listing what it picked and when.

The shortest version

If someone asks how many Game of the Year awards exist, the honest answer has two halves:

1. About 680 are handed out in a modern season, and 3,360 outlets have given at least one since 1990.
2. Roughly ten of them get reported on. The gap between those two numbers is the reason this site exists.