At the beginning of last month, GamesRadar revealed the nominees for its 2025 Golden Joysticks Awards, though one category, the Ultimate Game of the Year Award, was left out of the list. As of today, the shortlist for the most significant Golden Joysticks Award has been revealed, and it is stacked with games from independent developers making up most of the list, including Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince, and Peak.
It's the first major awards event to reveal a Game of the Year list, and while it has 12 games listed in total, which is more than you'd see for other major awards events, it really shows how despite 2025 having more than its fair share of big triple-A releases from major developers and publishers, the games that had the most impact came from independent studios.
In some cases, those independents did have major publisher support, but out of the seven games nominated made by independent studios, five of those games were made by smaller indie teams without a major publisher's support.
Here are the nominees for the Golden Joysticks 2025 Ultimate Game of the Year Award:
- Blue Prince
- Hollow Knight: Silksong
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- Peak
- Hades II
- Split Fiction
- Ghost of Yotei
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
- Silent Hill f
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
- Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
- Donkey Kong Bananza
While you might not agree with every game on this list, it's undeniable that this is a list of 12 of some of the best games released in 2025 (even though technically one of them was released at the end of 2024 and just didn't make it out in time for awards season).
Blue Prince, Hades II, Peak, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Hollow Knight: Silksong were all major indie titles from this year without a major publisher's support, and they are each, for their own reasons, more than fair candidates for 2025's game of the year. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Split Fiction were both made by independent teams but published by major triple-A studios, but the point that independent teams are making the biggest impact in 2025 still stands.
Major titles from triple-A developers and publishers, including DOOM: The Dark Ages, Borderlands 4, Assassin's Creed: Shadows, Monster Hunter Wilds, Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, and Battlefield 6, are all absent from this list.
You might disagree with some of those absences, but the impact of indies in 2025 cannot be denied. As always, the Golden Joysticks Awards are decided entirely by public vote following a jury selecting the nominees. Voting on the Ultimate Game of the Year is now live, if you want to add your voice to the conversation of which games deserve a big spotlight in 2025.
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