Titles like the Game Awards game of the year winner “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” and the viral sensation “Hollow Knight: Silksong” aren’t sidebar curiosities to the story of video games in 2025. They were the main event.
Half of the nominees for top honors at Thursday’s Game Awards ceremony are independently created or born from small teams, not blockbusters with nine-figure budgets. This shift isn’t just cosmetic. For years, including among Game Awards nominees since 2014, the same few big development studios armed with legacy intellectual property and immense publisher backing defined the games industry. Games like Sony PlayStation’s “The Last of Us” and “God of War” defined the past.
This year felt different. Indie projects are no longer niche or experimental outliers, they define the mainstream. “Expedition 33,” a debut title and new story from a fresh team of mostly young creators, earned a historic number of nominations and swept most of the awards, all on a reported budget of only about $10 million. Compare that to the best-selling but critically floundering Call of Duty series, where individual titles can now cost up to $700 million in lifetime development costs. We’ve finally arrived at a period where making Call of Duty with that kind of budget is a risky bet, despite the brand being the industry’s best-selling series for more than a decade.
Critics of the Game Awards, including myself, point out that the show is still driven by spectacle and commercial weight. Its viewership (154 million in 2024) has blown away award ceremonies in other industries because the event, founded by former journalist Geoff Keighley in 2014, is mostly a marketing vehicle for video games. Thursday night’s reveals only further cement this.
For every moment that celebrates creative innovation, there’s another that’s calibrated for maximum marketing impact. But even within that paradox, the industry’s evolution is unmistakable and impossible to ignore. Player and critical attention are now often directed toward games that prioritize imaginative design over balance sheets and returns on investment.
What makes this shift even more striking is the context of the Game Awards, an event expertly engineered for the churn of social media algorithms, paced like a never-ending highlight reel where every celebrity cameo (see Lenny Kravitz, promoting his first game appearance in IO Interactive’s 2026 James Bond title), world premiere trailer and Muppet appearance is crafted to be clipped, subtitled, memed and circulated within seconds. Another example: For the last week, the awards teased a new game with a hellish-looking statue made of corpses and fire placed in the Mojave Desert. It turned out to be a new game in Larian Studios’s original role-playing series Divinity. But the fact that the statue inspired so many other guesses (“God of War?” “Diablo?”) speaks to how narrow and interchangeable much of big-budget game aesthetics have become.
Yet the games breaking through aren’t always the ones built for virality. Aggro Crab’s “Peak” became a viral sensation based on word of mouth, rocketing past algorithmic noise. A posting trend among indie game developers this year (“My game is good, the algorithm just ignores me”) eventually overtook algorithms and presented exciting clips to thousands of potential players. It started as self-deprecating laments from struggling devs, but it’s become a rallying cry because it reveals the obvious truth, that algorithms ignore great work.
The announcements themselves reinforced this shift. Celebrated directors like Bruce Straley (“The Last of Us” co-director) and Davide Soliani (Mario + Rabbids) are returning not with massive, hyper-realistic blockbusters, but with games built in the quieter, more intimate scale of small studios. Their new projects feel like creative resets. Straley’s “Coven of the Chicken Root” centers on an older woman in a cooperative adventure that prizes warmth and playfulness over spectacle, while Soliani’s “Bradley the Badger” taps directly into the joyful experimentation of early-2000s platformers. These aren’t nostalgia plays — they’re reminders of how inventive games can be when freed from the anchor of blockbuster expectations.
Another celebrated creator, Toshihiro Nagoshi (the Yakuza series), has gone independent to further lean into his gifts. Nagoshi Studio announced “Gang of Dragon” starring South Korean actor Ma Dong-seok. It’s another realistic, dramatic gangster game, but it’s nice to see Nagoshi stretch his legs with new characters. And more than 60 developers from teams who made “Apex Legends” formed Wildlight Entertainment to create a new exciting style of hero shooter “Highguard,” which mixes high fantasy and guerrilla warfare to create something new and exciting (with a surprise early 2026 release).
The Game Awards has to do one thing, in my view, to evolve alongside the industry it reflects: Rethink the categories themselves. The show still leans on broad, catchall categories like “best action-adventure game” that flatten the range of craft that goes into making games. (Action-adventure game can mean anything in a medium that specializes in action and adventure.) “Content creator of the year” feels disconnected from the core purpose of recognizing the work of people who make games. “Most anticipated game” is obviously about marketing hype for upcoming products in a show that already advertises. These categories endure not because they illuminate excellence, but because they fit neatly into a show built for social-friendly marketing.
This year’s backlash over “best performance” (deservedly won by the star of “Expedition 33” Jennifer English) highlighted the long-standing issue. Voice actors and motion-capture performers contribute fundamentally different skills with different demands and different career pipelines. Folding them together diminishes both crafts.
Why not celebrate best level design? Such an award would celebrate the craft of pacing, tension and other contours of the audience experience. How about best character design, which encompasses talents like expressiveness, silhouette, language and costuming? Video game storytelling is inherently multidisciplinary. We could learn about the bit players of these talented studios.
Who was responsible for my favorite quests in “Ghost of Yotei?” Who designed Melinoë, the striking protagonist of “Hades II?” These are names that deserve an audience of 150 million people. In a media world where audiences have become dangerously incurious about the reasons behind their tastes, this recognition would feel not just overdue, but necessary.
But last night’s winners and new game announcements give me hope. “Control Resonant” by Remedy Entertainment (and follow-up to my best game of 2023 “Alan Wake 2”) was jaw dropping.
Quibbles aside, Keighley and his team have tightened up the ship. This year’s Game Awards moved at a quick clip with no hiccups, and used high-wire staging and lighting with interactive video to create a live theater experience. Regardless of how you feel about it as a commercial vehicle, it’s a darn good show that’s only gotten better over the years. Keighley has a lot to be proud of, especially since this show was dedicated to his father David Keighley, who died earlier this year.
In a corporate space, some of the most human stories still rose to the top. Clueless executives can chase trends all they want, but the audience will continue to reward craft, surprise and emotional specificity. It’s a creative industry strong enough to escape the machinery built to contain it.
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