For the First Time, Game of the Year Is Split 50/50 Between Blockbusters and Indies

2025 has been a banner year for the games industry, which is something The Game Awards seeks to recognize this December. Looking back at this annum, it's actually rather shocking how many great games have released: inventive projects like Blue Prince, The Alters, and Split Fiction, which would have been shoo-ins for a Game of the Year nomination in other years, haven't even made the list this year, showing just how jam-packed with quality the market has been recently.
While some of these omissions might be considered snubs by many, the actual lineup for the coveted Game of the Year award is nothing to scoff at. It includes heritage titles like Donkey Kong Bananza, which leads Nintendo's presence at the ceremony this year, but also smaller, more surprising releases like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In other words, both the long-standing AAA industry, carried by institutions like Sony and Nintendo, are represented strongly at The Game Awards 2025, but they are matched by the indie scene, which has never happened before.
The Game Awards 2025 Game of the Year Nominees
A quick glance at many online gaming communities will reveal a bevy of compelling arguments declaring that "AAA gaming is dead," and while this is a little hyperbolic, it's rooted in real, observable changes within the games industry. For years, AAA, blockbuster gaming was the only real way for the medium to express itself: game development was a far more niche and impenetrable field before the 2010s. As it would happen, the explosion of the indie scene occurred around the same time that many AAA studios began to alienate their audiences through practices like microtransactions, FOMO-driven live-service formulas, and general trend-chasing.
As blockbuster gaming started to succumb to the worst forces of the free market and chase increasingly ambitious yet creatively lacking releases (e.g., Anthem, Fallout 76), indie games got to work on developing the medium. It's not too much of a stretch to say that many of the most bold and impactful gaming innovations of the past decade have come from the indie scene: games like Disco Elysium and Kentucky Route Zero offered high art to consumers burnt out on cheap, reproducible experiences, while the likes of The Binding of Isaac, Hollow Knight, and Cuphead proved that games don't need to adhere to mainstream genre conventions to be successful.
This brings us to 2025, where three of the six Game of the Year nominees are either independently published or published by smaller, indie labels. What's more is that these three games all have excellent chances of winning Game of the Year—banish the notion that any of these might be performative or "sympathy" nominations. Clair Obscur is one of the most creative and exciting turn-based RPGs of the decade; Hollow Knight: Silksong exceeded the often unrealistic expectations set by its much-imitated predecessor; Hades 2 did something similar, building upon a foundation that had already grown to define the roguelike genre.
So, the simplest explanation as to why indie games are on somewhat equal footing at this year's Game Awards is that they have just been that good—better than AAA games, in many cases. No longer are indie games thought of as the quaint younger cousin of their AAA counterparts: they are proving to be extremely competitive, culturally impactful, and, crucially, profitable. Games like Clair Obscur aren't modest arthouse games praised by a small few but ignored by others: they are critical and commercial successes that have reached millions. If the industry continues on this trajectory, we can likely expect future Game Awards to represent indies with similar vigor. They could even far surpass the AAA world when it comes to such honors and recognition.​​​​​​​