Streamer Shroud recently asked his audience to vote for extraction shooter ARC Raiders over Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 at The Game Awards 2025, but his reasoning doesn’t make much sense. ARC Raiders has quickly become one of the year’s most popular new releases, with millions of gamers flocking to the extraction shooter across PC and consoles. Clair Obscur, meanwhile, is a critically-acclaimed turn-based RPG that has earned rave reviews for its incredible soundtrack and emotionally-charged story.
Game Awards 2025 nominees have yet to be announced, but many agree that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a front-runner to win the top prize. ARC Raiders may also have a chance, though it being nominated for GOTY is less of a guarantee than Expedition 33. In any case, Shroud has stirred up some controversy by telling his viewers, “We gotta make sure that [ARC Raiders] wins game of the year, by the way. Do not let that Expedition game win Game of the Year. Do not let it. Absolutely do not. We all have to band together to make this game win.” Shroud would later point out that the last time a multiplayer game won GOTY was when Overwatch won in 2016.
Game of the Year Winner List
- 2014: Dragon Age: Inquisition
- 2015: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
- 2016: Overwatch
- 2017: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- 2018: God of War
- 2019: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
- 2020: The Last of Us Part 2
- 2021: It Takes Two
- 2022: Elden Ring
- 2023: Baldur’s Gate 3
- 2024: Astro Bot
Six out of the 11 Game Awards GOTY winners have been purely single-player experiences. Dragon Age: Inquisition, It Takes Two, Elden Ring, and Baldur’s Gate 3 are all co-op, with It Takes Two explicitly only playable through co-op. Overwatch is the only pure competitive multiplayer game to win GOTY, while Elden Ring features a mix of cooperative and competitive multiplayer elements.
Shroud was presumably referring to purely competitive multiplayer games with his comments, and so that means the only winner that fits is Overwatch. The problem then becomes what groundbreaking competitive multiplayer games should have won in place of these other games? A case could be made for PUBG: Battlegrounds as it popularized the battle royale genre, but can many say that it should have beat The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2017? PUBG was in early access when it was up for GOTY contention and riddled with serious technical problems. Then there’s Fortnite. Epic’s BR followed in the footsteps of PUBG, but managed to completely surpass it and become one of the most popular games of all time.
Fortnite‘s BR released in early access in 2017, the same year PUBG was nominated. It didn’t have its proper 1.0 release until 2020, when it was nominated for Best Ongoing Game and Best Community Support. The muddiness of Fortnite‘s early access status caused confusion and likely sabotaged its chance of being nominated for GOTY, but regardless, if it was nominated in 2017, should it have won against The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? Breath of the Wild is one of the highest-rated video games ever made, currently in the sixth spot according to review aggregate site Metacritic. Fortnite‘s cultural impact is incredible, but how many genuinely consider it to be a better game than Breath of the Wild?
If we say Fortnite should have been eligible in 2020, that makes things a little more interesting. The Last of Us Part 2 is a highly controversial game, but largely for story reasons as opposed to its gameplay, which even its biggest haters will admit is top-tier. Some could make the argument that Fortnite was more deserving in 2020 than The Last of Us Part 2, but even though 2020 was the year of its 1.0 release, it was already years-old at that point and was instead nominated in other categories. Maybe Call of Duty: Warzone should have been nominated that year because of how popular it was during the pandemic, but the game has also received its fair share of unpopular updates and suffered from a serious cheater problem. It was also confusingly presented as both a standalone thing and a mode for the 2019 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare game.
There is Already a Best Multiplayer Game Award
One of Shroud’s suggestions was that there should be a single-player GOTY and a multiplayer GOTY. The thing is, there is already an award at The Game Awards that recognizes the Best Multiplayer Game. Whether the category always adheres to rules that make sense (Call of Duty: Warzone was nominated in 2020 but lost to 2018’s Among Us), is one thing, but the award exists.
Best Multiplayer Game Winners at The Game Awards
- 2014: N/A
- 2015: Splatoon
- 2016: Overwatch
- 2017: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
- 2018: Fortnite
- 2019: Apex Legends
- 2020: Among Us
- 2021: It Takes Two
- 2022: Splatoon 3
- 2023: Baldur’s Gate 3
- 2024: Helldivers 2
The Best Multiplayer category didn’t exist until the 2015 Game Awards, with Splatoon picking up the prize. Overwatch won in 2016, followed by PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, Among Us, It Takes Two, Splatoon 3, Baldur’s Gate 3, and finally, Helldivers 2. Besides Among Us winning in 2020 despite being a 2018 game, the Best Multiplayer category seems to have largely hit on the most popular newly-released multiplayer games each year, depending on one’s definition of multiplayer. What potentially should happen is a split in the multiplayer category. Perhaps The Game Awards would benefit from a category specifically for co-op games, and another specifically for competitive multiplayer games. The years that co-op games won, like It Takes Two and Baldur’s Gate 3, there weren’t really any big new competitive multiplayer games nominated anyway, but it would still be nice to have that distinction.
Shroud won Content Creator of the Year at The Game Awards 2019 and was nominated for Trending Gamer in 2017.
The Game Awards 2025 host Geoff Keighley has not made any announcements about potentially splitting up the Multiplayer category between competitive and co-op. But for now, there is still an all-encompassing GOTY award, as there should be, and a separate award for Best Multiplayer so excellent co-op and PvP experiences still get recognized. The Game Awards 2025 will take place on December 11 and nominees have yet to be announced at the time of this writing.
- Released
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October 30, 2025
- ESRB
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Teen / Violence, Blood
