Which game won Game of the Year in 2025?
Depends who you ask. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won The Game Awards GOTY on December 11th, breaking the record with nine total awards. Then it won Indie Game Awards GOTY on December 18th. Then it got stripped of the Indie awards two days later because Sandfall Interactive admitted using AI for placeholder textures. Hollow Knight: Silksong won Steam’s GOTY. Blue Prince is now officially the Indie Game Awards GOTY winner after Clair Obscur’s disqualification. Three different winners across three different platforms, one retroactive disqualification, and enough discourse to fill a landfill.
This is why GOTY season is exhausting.
The Clair Obscur Situation
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched in April 2025 to critical acclaim. A turn-based RPG from French studio Sandfall Interactive, visually stunning, strong narrative, available on Game Pass Day 1. The game swept The Game Awards in December, winning nine categories including Game of the Year, Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, Best Art Direction, Best Performance, Best Debut Indie Game, Best Independent Game, and Best RPG. The nine awards broke the previous record of seven held by The Last of Us Part II.
A week later, Clair Obscur won Game of the Year and Best Debut Game at the Indie Game Awards. Two days after that, Six One Indie, the organization running the Indie Game Awards, stripped both awards because Sandfall confirmed using generative AI during development. The awards went to Blue Prince for GOTY and Sorry We’re Closed for Best Debut Game.
The AI usage? Placeholder textures generated temporarily during early development. Some shipped in the final game because QA missed them; specifically some posters with AI-generated text and images on a pillar. Sandfall patched them out within five days of launch. The studio stated they experimented with AI briefly when the technology emerged in 2022, didn’t like it, removed it, but a few assets slipped through into release. Everything else, concept art, voice acting, actual textures, was human-made.
The Indie Game Awards has a strict “no generative AI in any capacity” policy. Sandfall representatives agreed during submission that no AI was used. When Sandfall publicly clarified the situation on the day of the awards premiere, Six One Indie disqualified the game retroactively despite voting having concluded and the show already being recorded.
What Even Counts as “Indie” Anymore
The bigger question buried under the AI discourse: is Clair Obscur actually indie? Sandfall Interactive is a 30-person development team. The game has AAA production values. It launched on Game Pass Day 1 with Microsoft marketing support including a Developer_Direct showcase. The president of France congratulated them on winning GOTY. The studio flew the entire team from France to attend The Game Awards wearing traditional French marinières with red berets as a coordinated publicity stunt.
This doesn’t look like indie by any traditional definition. The term originally meant independent from publisher control—self-funded, self-published, creative freedom without corporate oversight. Now “indie” means anything not published by the major three whilst simultaneously including games with corporate backing, marketing budgets, and distribution deals that would have made studios blush a decade ago.
Clair Obscur qualified for The Game Awards’ indie categories whilst also being nominated for GOTY alongside AAA titles. The game simultaneously exists as a scrappy underdog indie success story and a well-funded production with corporate support. Both narratives are true depending on which framing benefits the discussion. The contradiction doesn’t get resolved because nobody wants to define “indie” precisely enough to exclude popular games.
The Performative AI Discourse
The AI controversy represents peak performative outrage. Sandfall used AI briefly for placeholder textures in 2022 when the technology emerged. They didn’t like it. They removed it. A few assets shipped by accident. They patched it within days when discovered. The final game is 99.9% human-created work from a 30-person team spending years developing a turn-based RPG.
The Indie Game Awards retroactively stripped awards already given, recorded, and broadcast because placeholder textures that no longer exist in the game violated their zero-tolerance AI policy. The punishment is stripping recognition from hundreds of hours of human creative work because temporary assets generated during early development briefly existed in the final release before being removed.
Meanwhile, Photoshop’s tools operate on generative AI. Spell-check uses AI. Grammar correction uses AI. Excel and Google Sheets have AI features that function even when front-facing AI settings are disabled. Are we stripping awards from every game that used these tools during development? Because that’s the logical endpoint of zero-tolerance policies on any AI use whatsoever.
The discourse splits between “any AI usage is disqualifying regardless of context or amount” versus “AI tools are already integrated into development pipelines and pretending otherwise is dishonest.” Both positions are defensible. Neither is productive. The resulting arguments are exhausting performances of ideological purity rather than meaningful discussions about how generative AI actually impacts creative work.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director Daniel Vávra called it “AI hysteria.” Larian CEO Swen Vincke admitted using AI and faced backlash. CD Projekt Red, Epic Games, and numerous other developers use AI tools in various capacities. The technology is integrated into development workflows whether people like it or not. Pretending otherwise requires ignoring how modern software development actually functions whilst performatively boycotting games that admit using tools everyone else uses quietly.
Why GOTY Doesn’t Matter
The Game of the Year discourse fundamentally doesn’t matter because people play what they enjoy regardless of awards. Clair Obscur sold over 300,000 copies in the five days following The Game Awards. Steam concurrent players hit 57,000. The game saw a 160% weekly player increase. Getting stripped of Indie Game Awards two weeks later didn’t affect those numbers because players don’t care about awards discourse, they care whether the game is good.
Hollow Knight: Silksong won Steam’s GOTY. The platform’s users voted for it over Clair Obscur and Blue Prince. Different audience, different winner, equally valid. PlayStation Blog ran their own GOTY awards with different winners. Every gaming publication runs their own GOTY lists with different results. The Game Awards represents one organization’s opinion about the year’s best games. It’s not objective truth, just consensus among a specific voting body at a specific point in time.
The awards function as marketing more than measurement. Winning GOTY provides a sales boost, visibility, and legitimacy that helps smaller studios reach wider audiences. Clair Obscur benefited massively from The Game Awards exposure. Getting stripped of Indie Game Awards didn’t erase that benefit because the marketing value already transferred. Awards are transactional tools for visibility rather than definitive statements about quality.
The discourse surrounding GOTY, which game deserves it, which got snubbed, which categories make sense, whether the voting is legitimate, exists primarily to fill content calendars during the December/January slow period. The arguments generate engagement through controversy whilst fundamentally not affecting which games people actually play. Everyone has opinions. None of the opinions matter beyond giving people something to argue about whilst waiting for new releases.
The Bottom Line
Game of the Year 2025 was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 according to The Game Awards and Steam. It was Blue Prince according to the Indie Game Awards. It was Hollow Knight: Silksong according to Steam users. All three answers are correct depending on which authority you recognize. None of the answers matter because awards don’t determine what’s actually good, they determine what specific voting bodies agreed was best at specific points in time under specific criteria.
The AI controversy demonstrates that awards discourse cares more about ideological purity than nuanced discussion. Stripping awards retroactively over placeholder textures that shipped briefly before being removed represents zero-tolerance policies prioritizing punishment over context. The discourse generates more heat than light whilst accomplishing nothing except creating content for people to argue about.
Does Game of the Year discourse serve any purpose beyond marketing and generating arguments, or does the proliferation of competing GOTY awards prove the entire concept is subjective performance rather than objective measurement?
Either way, the discourse is exhausting. Multiple games won GOTY depending on who you ask. One got stripped retroactively. Nobody can agree what “indie” means. The AI arguments are performative. And none of it matters because people play what they enjoy regardless of what awards shows decide is officially the best.
Play what you like. Ignore the circus. The awards will continue happening annually whether they mean anything or not.
