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Most Game of the Year awards of all time
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 holds the record with 540 Game of the Year awards from its 2025 season — 104 ahead of Elden Ring. But the raw count is only half the story: measured as a share of its season, the most dominant winner on record is Elden Ring, which took 72.2% of everything handed out in 2022.
A word on what this list is. It is not "the best games ever" and it is not a complete census of every award ever handed out. It is a count of how many separate media outlets, juries and reader polls named each game their overall Game of the Year, across 8,974 documented awards from 1990 onward. Only seasons tracked at census breadth are compared with one another, which now covers 2003–2025. The seasons before 2003 hold a handful of surviving awards each: a record that those awards happened, not a count.
The Guinness record, and why we can now stand next to it
Elden Ring's 2022 haul is a Guinness World Record, published as 435 of 599 Game of the Year awards on the record's own page (Guinness World Records, checked 13 October 2026). Counting our own rows award by award, we arrive at 436 — within one award of the published figure, reached independently. For a long time this page had to explain that the record came from a larger count than ours and could not be mixed in. It no longer does: the recent seasons were reconstructed outlet by outlet, and landing on the published number is the strongest check we have that the reconstruction is sound.
Why the top of this table keeps moving
The tracked field keeps growing, so each new season can beat the raw totals of every season before it without any game being more dominant. That is exactly what happened between Elden Ring and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: more awards, a smaller share of its own year (71.1% against 72.2%). Read the share column before concluding that a record was broken.
Where these newer rows come from.
The 2022–2025 seasons lean on a curated third-party tracker that cites a primary source per award, tagged aggregated in our database — a weaker claim than the awards we have read the source for ourselves. The awards-per-year page breaks every season down by tier, and the methodology explains what each tier means.
How to read a total honestly
The number of awards tracked per season grew from 42 in 2003 to 760 in 2025. In 2008 the season's winner took 69 awards; in 2020 it took 325. That is why every entry here carries its year, and why the share column further down matters more than the raw count.
Read this first.
These totals are a documented minimum, not a complete count, and the number of outlets tracked grew enormously over the years. A 2005 total and a 2020 total are not the same currency — compare share instead, in the table below.
How the tracked field grew
This is the single most important chart on the site, because it explains why raw totals cannot be compared across years. In 2003 the archive recorded 42 Game of the Year awards; the largest season on record, 2025, holds 760. A game with 60 awards would have finished second in 2008 and fourth in 2020.
Awards tracked that seasonThe winner's own total
The dashed line is the winner's own haul. Where the two lines move apart, the field grew faster than any single game could keep up with.
The most-awarded game of every year
- Awards
- How many separate outlets named this game their overall Game of the Year that season. One outlet, one award.
- Tracked
- How many GOTY awards we documented for that whole season, across every game. This grew from 42 in 2003 to 760 in 2025.
- Share
- Awards ÷ Tracked. The percentage of that season's awards the winner took — the only number that compares fairly across years.
Tap any column heading to sort the table.
| Year | Winner | Awards | Tracked | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 | 540 | 760 | 71% |
| 2024 | Astro Bot | 183 | 506 | 36% |
| 2023 | Baldur's Gate 3 | 289 | 543 | 53% |
| 2022 | Elden Ring | 436 | 604 | 72% |
| 2021 | It Takes Two | 89 | 449 | 20% |
| 2020 | The Last of Us Part II | 325 | 649 | 50% |
| 2019 | Death Stranding | 118 | 471 | 25% |
| 2018 | God of War | 264 | 516 | 51% |
| 2017 | The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild | 265 | 462 | 57% |
| 2016 | Uncharted 4: A Thief's End | 191 | 482 | 40% |
| 2015 | The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt | 281 | 482 | 58% |
| 2014 | Dragon Age: Inquisition | 139 | 440 | 32% |
| 2013 | The Last of Us | 257 | 545 | 47% |
| 2012 | The Walking Dead: The Game | 75 | 401 | 19% |
| 2011 | The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim | 230 | 412 | 56% |
| 2010 | Red Dead Redemption | 112 | 305 | 37% |
| 2009 | Uncharted 2: Among Thieves | 117 | 227 | 52% |
| 2008 | Fallout 3 | 69 | 214 | 32% |
| 2007 | BioShock | 48 | 165 | 29% |
| 2006 | The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion | 42 | 121 | 35% |
| 2005 | Resident Evil 4 | 38 | 69 | 55% |
| 2004 | Half-Life 2 | 26 | 63 | 41% |
| 2003 | Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic | 18 | 42 | 43% |
Has any year produced a runaway winner?
Share is the fair comparison, and it tells a different story from the raw counts. The most dominant seasons in this archive are not the ones with the biggest numbers — they are the years where the industry simply agreed.
A share above 50% means more than half of everyone who handed out a Game of the Year award that season handed it to the same game. Below 30% means the year had no consensus at all, and whichever game you remember winning probably did win — somewhere.
So which game really won the most?
By raw count inside this archive: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, with 540. By share of its own season: Elden Ring, with 72.2% of 2022. They are not the same game, and both answers are defensible: they answer different questions. Anyone giving you a single number without saying which question it answers is guessing.
Quick answers
What is the most awarded video game of all time?
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, with 540 Game of the Year awards from the 2025 season - 104 more than Elden Ring, the runner-up. Every award is one outlet naming the game its overall Game of the Year.
Which game won the biggest share of its season?
Elden Ring, which took 72.2% of every Game of the Year award tracked for 2022. Share is the fair comparison across years, because the field of outlets grew from 42 awards in 2003 to 760 in 2025.
Which game won the most awards in each year?
The season winner: the game named Game of the Year by the most outlets. The table on this page lists it for every season from 2003 to 2025, with its total and its share.
Updated 13 October 2026 · Source: the Meta Awards database, where every award row cites where it was published.