2025 was a banner year for the gaming industry, which is something The Game Awards trying to recognize this December. Looking back at this time of year, it's actually quite shocking how many great games came out: inventive projects like Blue Prince, The Altersand Partition Fictionwho would have been nominated for game of the year in other years didn't even make the list this year, which shows how loaded the market has been with quality lately.
While some of these omissions might be considered insults by many, the actual lineup for the coveted Game of the Year award is nothing to scoff at. Includes legacy titles like Donkey Kong Bananawhich leads Nintendo's presence at the ceremony this year, but also smaller, more surprising releases like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In other words, how the long-standing AAA industry, run by institutions like Sony and Nintendo, is heavily represented at The Game Awards 2025, but matched by the indie scene, which has never happened before.
Nominated for The Game Awards 2025 Game of the Year
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (India)
- Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
- Donkey Kong Banana
- Hades 2 (India)
- Hollow Knight: Silksong (India)
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Why are indie games so prevalent at The Game Awards this year?
A lot of the best games of 2025 were indie, and that's no accident
A quick look at many online gaming communities will reveal plenty of compelling arguments to the effect that “AAA gaming is dead,” and while it's a bit hyperbolic, it's rooted in real, observable changes in the gaming industry. For years, AAA blockbusters were the only real way to express the medium: game development was a much more specific and impenetrable field before 2010. As it happened, the indie scene exploded around the same time that many AAA studios began alienating their audiences through practices like microtransactions, FOMO-driven live service formulas, and general trend-watching.
As blockbuster games began to succumb to the worst forces of the free market and chase increasingly ambitious yet creatively lacking releases (e.g. Anthem, Fallout 76), indie games had to work to evolve the medium. It's not too much of a stretch to say that many of the boldest and most impactful gaming innovations of the past decade have come from the indie scene: games like Disco Elysium and Kentucky Route Zero offered high art to consumers burned out on cheap, reproducible experiences while similar The Binding of Isaac, Hollow Knightand Cuphead proved that games don't need to adhere to traditional genre conventions to be successful.
This brings us to 2025, where three of the six Game of the Year nominees are either self-published or published by smaller independent publishers. What's more, all three of these games have excellent chances to win Game of the Year – banish the idea that any of them could be nominated for performance or “likability”. Clair Obscuro is one of the most creative and exciting turn-based RPGs of the decade; Hollow Knight: Silksong exceeded the often unrealistic expectations set by his much-imitated predecessor; Hades 2 they did something similar, building on the foundations that had already grown to define the roguelike genre.
The simplest explanation for why indie games are on par at this year's awards is that they were just as good – in many cases better – than AAA games. Indie games are no longer seen as the quaint younger cousin of their AAA counterparts: they're proving to be extremely competitive, culturally impactful, and most importantly, profitable. Games like Clair Obscuro they're not humble art games praised by a few but ignored by others: they're critical and commercial successes that have reached millions. If the industry continues on this trajectory, we can probably expect future game awards to represent independent indies with a similar strength. They might even far surpass the AAA world in terms of such honors and recognition.
