GOTY 2026 is the Weakest Field in Years

In the shadow of GTA 6, other contenders keep missing the mark

Early this year, I kicked off my annual ranking of front-runners for the Game of the Year award at The Game Awards with Resident Evil Requiem in the top spot. It's still there. This is not how I expected things to go. But every potential GOTY contender in 2026 either has huge disadvantages to overcome — because it hails from a genre or franchise that isn't favored — or, quite simply, hasn't been good enough.

It was always going to be a strange year. There was a presumptive winner before the year even began: Grand Theft Auto 6. That remains the case, although, given Rockstar's apparent reticence to let anybody play it, we may be waiting until the eleventh hour for its assumed coronation to be confirmed.

It's understandable that this looming behemoth has sucked the air out of the room. But it's still surprising that the race for second place has been so moribund. Quirks of this year's release schedule and slate have been met by a parade of games that have marched up to the quality bar and stopped just short of it — or, perhaps, by a community of game critics that has been less generous than usual with their acclaim.

I expected all that to change this week, mostly because of The Blood of Dawnwalker. This vampire RPG from some of the team behind GOTY winner The Witcher 3 appeared to have "critical darling" and "Game Awards GOTY contender" written all over it. It's in the right genre, it's narratively ambitious, it has pedigree, yet it comes from an upstart development studio, giving it more authenticity and credibility than your typical AAA franchise fare.

At Polygon, we love this game, but the wider games media sphere — from which The Game Awards draws its voting jury — is decidedly lukewarm. It sits at a just-about respectable 83 on Metacritc. I am not sure that is even enough to get it a nomination (even though it's more than the bizarrely resilient Crimson Desert). Players, too, seem merely whelmed with it: English Steam reviews are "mostly positive."

Two other games were received with similarly mild approval this week: Onimusha: Way of the Sword and Orbitals, the latter a sparky indie co-op game in the mold of GOTY winner It Takes Two. Both were more dark horses than The Blood of Dawnwalker, but now they're not even that.

This keeps happening. The magic 90-plus Metacritic scores which — combined with genre favorability — announce a likely GOTY nominee have proved elusive for many games. The few that have reached that bar in 2026 face hurdles to secure nominations. Big Walk is an indie and a multiplayer game, best experienced with friends. Forza Horizon 6 is a racing game; its predecessor couldn't secure a nomination with a stellar score in a historically weak year. Mina the Hollower is cultish and not widely played.

Even below the 90 mark, the field is riddled with weaknesses. Crimson Desert is outright hated by many critics. The jury takes neither Pokémon nor life sims seriously, so Pokopia will struggle. 007 First Light looks stronger than most, but the jury typically looks down on licensed games. This is how we end up in September with only one game which can be considered a lock for a nomination: the solid, if not quite spectacular, Resident Evil Requiem.

Once upon a time, this wouldn't have been so surprising; the fall months would typically supply a wealth of contenders. There's still the potential for things to shift in the next few weeks as publishers sprint to release their wares before the GTA 6 meteor hits: there's Marvel's Wolverine, Gears of War: E-Day, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, Phantom Blade Zero, Control Resonant, and a few others. Right now, none of them looks like a 90-plus smash, but I could be wrong. The one game assured of that kind of universal acclaim is the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, but there's no guarantee it will be released before the cutoff date, and in any case, as a remake, it too has a big disadvantage.

There are several factors at play here, including a historic wobble in AAA game production and the halting return of mid-sized games like last year's GOTY winner, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. But the net result leaves an impression of an industry, and a critical class, and a playerbase who are all just waiting for Grand Theft Auto 6 to come out. Maybe its win is a foregone conclusion. But, as I've said before, Rockstar can be beat, as it was in 2013 (by The Last of Us) and 2018 (by God of War). I'd love to see one game, just one, step up and try.