How many Game of the Year awards are given out each year?
The census grew from 40 tracked awards out of
40 outlets in 2003 to a peak of
765 awards from 683 outlets in 2025.
That growth is the single most important thing to know before comparing any
two seasons — the total measures how much of the world was being counted,
not how exciting the year was.
765Peak · 2025
388Average per full year
683Most outlets voting (2025)
23Fully documented years
Awards per year
Every tracked award, stacked by who voted: media outlets against readers'
and community votes. Seasons up to 2021 come from the archived census;
2022 onward is reconstructed award by award, which is why the
Sourcing column below matters as much as the totals. Only
2000, 2001, 2002 still falls short of census breadth.
Media outletsReaders' choice
Raw totals are not comparable across years.
The original tracker followed ever more outlets over time, so a 2004 winner
could never reach a 2020 winner's count. Cross-year questions belong to the
award share, which the records page uses and
explains — see also the methodology. Counts on
this page tally the stored award rows; season pages cite the source's
published year totals, which can sit a few awards higher (the documented
reconciliation gap of about 0.7%).
The controlling table
How to read this as a health check of the database: outlets
voting should move smoothly against neighbouring years — a sudden
dip inside 2003–2025 would mean lost coverage, not a quiet
season. Awards per outlet should stay near 1.0–1.3 (one
editorial vote per outlet, plus readers' votes and ties); a spike would
point at duplicate rows. Sourcing shows how the season was
assembled — archive census, rows from a cited aggregator, or awards we
sourced one by one (see methodology); a season
built from thin sourcing deserves more scepticism than its total suggests.
Partial years carry only what we can document so far.