Has a Grand Theft Auto game ever won Game of the Year?

The short answer

Not if Game of the Year means the game most outlets named. The 5 games whose title begins with Grand Theft Auto have collected 222 Game of the Year awards between them, and they have won 0 of the 23 seasons this site counts at full breadth. The best finish is No. 2: Grand Theft Auto V in 2013, 92 awards behind The Last of Us.

If it means a trophy from a single ceremony, the answer is yes: 9 times, including the Spike Video Game Awards in 2004, 2008 and 2013. That show was the predecessor of The Game Awards, which began in 2014, the year after Grand Theft Auto V came out.

One of the best-selling series ever made

On the sales chart, Grand Theft Auto sits near the very top:

• Grand Theft Auto V "has sold-in over 230 million units worldwide", Take-Two said in its results for the quarter to 30 June 2026. Only Minecraft and Tetris, counted across all its versions, have sold more, according to Wikipedia's list of best-selling video games as of October 2026.
• The series as a whole stood at almost 475 million units after the same report, as Game Developer reported on 7 August 2026. That makes it the fifth best-selling game franchise, behind Mario, Tetris, Pokémon and Call of Duty, on Wikipedia's list of best-selling franchises as edited on 4 October 2026.

"Sold-in" is the publisher's figure for copies sold to stores and storefronts, not a count of players. Either way, measured in awards the picture turns around.

Every Grand Theft Auto, and what beat it

• Grand Theft Auto V took 165 awards in 2013, 30.3% of everything handed out that season, and still finished 92 awards behind The Last of Us. Among all the games that collected awards without winning their season, it ranks No. 2, in a list led by Red Dead Redemption 2.
• Grand Theft Auto IV finished No. 3 in 2008, in a three-way race: Fallout 3 won, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was second, and Grand Theft Auto IV was 29 awards off the lead.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas finished No. 3 in 2004, 17 awards behind Half-Life 2.
• Grand Theft Auto III has its best result in 2001, a season from before the census began in 2003. The table shows where it stands on the few awards that survive from that year, which is a record that those awards were given, not a count of how many were.

These totals are documented minimums: every award on this page has a cited source, and an award nobody wrote down is not in the count. The ranking inside a season is still a fair comparison, because both games were counted the same way.

Players kept it close. The press did not.

The archive this site rebuilt published a split for every game: awards from media outlets, and awards from readers' polls. For the two biggest Grand Theft Auto seasons it reads like this:

• 2013: readers' polls gave Grand Theft Auto V 56 awards and The Last of Us 58. Media outlets gave Grand Theft Auto V 109 and The Last of Us 199.
• 2008: readers' polls gave Grand Theft Auto IV 14, Fallout 3 18 and Metal Gear Solid 4 15. Media outlets gave them 26, 51 and 26.

Read the rows side by side: the readers' figures sit close together, the media figures do not. Whether players and critics usually agree is its own question, answered in readers versus critics.

It did win Game of the Year, at the ceremonies

A ceremony's Game of the Year is one jury's verdict, or one public vote. The count on this site asks something else: which game the most outlets named, with every award counting once. A game can win a famous trophy and still lose the season, and Grand Theft Auto has done exactly that. How each kind of vote works is explained in how Game of the Year is decided, and every ceremony's own record is on the awards page.

Rockstar has won a season, just not with GTA

Red Dead Redemption took the 2010 season with 112 awards, and Rockstar Games' count of census seasons won as a publisher stands at 1. Its sequel, Red Dead Redemption 2, is the other Rockstar game near the top of the list of games that never won: 179 awards, and its season went to God of War.

Grand Theft Auto VI

Rockstar has set Grand Theft Auto VI for 19 November 2026. That puts it in the 2026 season, which this site is tracking as the awards come in.

A November release is a late one, and late games are often said to have the edge. The record does not show that. Of the 22 census winners whose release date is known, 14 came out between January and June and 8 between July and December.

The full record of the series, game by game, is on the Grand Theft Auto franchise page.