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Most Game of the Year awards of all time
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 holds the record with 544 Game of the Year awards from its 2025 season — 106 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 72.3% 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 8,959 documented awards from 2000 onward. A season only enters this ranking once we track it at census breadth — roughly 400 to 650 awards. That now covers 2000–2024; the 2025 season is still too thin and is left out rather than shown as though it were complete.
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 Game of the Year awards. Counting our own rows award by award, we arrive at 438 — the same figure within two awards, 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 slightly smaller share of its own year. Read the share column before concluding that a record was broken.
Where these newer rows come from.
The 2022–2024 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 outlets handing out a Game of the Year grew from 38 in 2003 to 643 in 2020. A game that won 60 awards in 2008 beat almost everything in front of it; a game that won 60 in 2020 finished well down the field. 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 38 Game of the Year awards. By 2020 it recorded 643, and the seasons since have stayed in that range. A game winning 60 awards in 2008 was dominating its field; a game winning 60 in 2020 was an also-ran.
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.
Every winner, and how dominant they were
- 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 38 in 2003 to 643 in 2020.
- 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 | 544 | 765 | 71% |
| 2024 | Astro Bot | 185 | 509 | 36% |
| 2023 | Baldur's Gate 3 | 292 | 546 | 53% |
| 2022 | Elden Ring | 438 | 606 | 72% |
| 2021 | It Takes Two | 89 | 451 | 20% |
| 2020 | The Last of Us Part II | 325 | 651 | 50% |
| 2019 | Death Stranding | 118 | 472 | 25% |
| 2018 | God of War | 264 | 517 | 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 | 441 | 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 | 304 | 37% |
| 2009 | Uncharted 2: Among Thieves | 116 | 226 | 51% |
| 2008 | Fallout 3 | 69 | 213 | 32% |
| 2007 | BioShock | 47 | 163 | 29% |
| 2006 | The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion | 42 | 118 | 36% |
| 2005 | Resident Evil 4 | 37 | 68 | 54% |
| 2004 | Half-Life 2 | 25 | 61 | 41% |
| 2003 | Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic | 18 | 40 | 45% |
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 544. By share of its own season, the most dominant winners are the ones at the top of the share column above — and they are not the same games. By the largest published figure of any kind, Elden Ring's 435 awards for 2022 stands alone. All three answers are defensible; they simply answer different questions. Anyone giving you a single number without saying which question it answers is guessing.