My 2025 GOTY Is Impossible To Predict

My 2025 GOTY Is Impossible To Predict

Having looked back at The Game Awards‘ Most Anticipated Game recently, it’s clear that the biggest game tends to be the one we’re all looking forward to. Shocking, I know. Allowing for a couple of games being delayed and one massive miss (looking at you, No Man’s Sky), the game named Most Anticipated tends to do very well in GOTY the following year. It stands to reason then that we consider Grand Theft Auto 6 the front-runner for Game of the Year 2025. But I’m not sure it will be mine.

I don’t have anything against GTA per se, but I thought 4 was better than 5, and think the two best games Rockstar has made are the two Red Dead Redemptions. I’d be a lot more excited by the prospect of RDR 3 than I am GTA 6, and would consider the cowboy adventure as the one to beat going into the year. I’ll play GTA 6, I expect to like GTA 6, but I’m not sure it’s nailed on for my own GOTY. In fact, I have no idea what my GOTY might be next year.

My Game Of The Year Is Usually Unexpected

Marissa Marcel stands by a microphone in a dark room.

On the one hand, again, this is obvious. The whole point of a Game of the Year is to say ‘this is the best game of all the games I have played’ and if I haven’t played them yet, I couldn’t possibly pick my favourite. But the best games tend to be the ones I’m surprised by, and that makes looking forward to 2025 an exciting prospect. It’s always the ones you least suspect.

This year, I named Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth as my Game of the Year, and while I enjoyed Ichiban’s previous outing, I wasn’t going into 2024 with eyes for it alone. While it is great as a singular experience, my own personal emotional connection to it (and particularly, to the time I played it) was a major factor in its placement. In second place was 1000xResist, which I had no knowledge of at the start of the year. Third place was Balatro, and ditto.

In 2023, it was (along with roughly 80 percent of the population) Baldur’s Gate 3. I hadn’t played in early access – and rarely do, as a rule – and while I had heard good things and expected it to scratch the D&D itch, I never expected it to take over the world. No one did. Remember when it moved to avoid clashing with Starfield?

2022 it was Marvel’s Midnight Suns, another game I didn’t expect when the game began, but on reflection I wish I had named Immortality as my number one. Nope, hadn’t heard of that one beforehand either. 2021, my first year picking at TheGamer, it was Life is Strange: True Colors. I can’t remember if it was announced prior to 2021, but if you gave me a list of 20 random games from a year before I played them and asked me to pick the one I expected to like, this is the only year I think I’d get right.

I Haven’t Even Heard Of The Best Games Of 2025 Yet

Bye Sweet Carole Lana kneeling by tree

There doesn’t seem to be a personal standout for me heading into 2025. GTA 6 could well end up in contention, but it’s not running away with it. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is obviously one to watch after Infinite Wealth, as is Lost Records after True Colors. Split Fiction, Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Pokemon Legends: Z-A are also available at all good bookmakers at relatively short odds.

The latter game there is another obvious factor – we’re getting a Switch 2 (a hybrid console by any other name) in 2025, and I expect it to launch with a mammoth catalogue. Who doesn’t love a 3D Mario game, right? Animal Crossing would have been a contender if I did a list in 2020, so the follow-up is worth keeping an eye on, and maybe we get a fantastic Kirby, or Fire Emblem, or Kid Icarus, which would all be in the mix if they live up to their predecessors.

But between Immortality, 1000xResist, and Balatro, it’s very likely that at least one major contender for the crown will not be on my radar at all. It may be an indie game I have the vaguest inkling of, like Despelote, Time Flies, or Bye Sweet Carole, or one I haven’t heard of at all, miss at launch, and don’t play until months later when someone at the site bugs me into it. Eric or Ben, probably.

My brain is still in GOTY mode, and while I know it’s important to appreciate a game for the experience of playing it and not to put it on an arbitrary annual list, doing said list pushes me into new experiences to appreciate, so I think it balances out. Maybe my 2025 GOTY is Yakuza, maybe it’s GTA 6, maybe it’s a game you and I and everybody aside from a team of like three people making it has never heard of. But the upcoming year is an all you can eat buffet, and I’m ready to stack my plate high.

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Platform(s)

PS5
, Xbox Series X|S

Released

2025-00-00

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