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A defensible ranking of The Game Awards’ Game of the Year nominee classes from the 2020s needs the complete nominee list for every year being compared. The available official records here verify the 2025 class and winner, but do not establish the 2020–2024 rosters. So a full decade ranking would overstate what the evidence supports. This article separates the verified 2025 record from the historical gaps rather than inventing a leaderboard.
What counts as a “nominee class”?
A nominee class is the full set of games selected for The Game Awards’ Game of the Year category in a given year. Ranking classes is different from ranking individual games: the question is how strong and varied each year’s group is as a whole, not which single game won.
Any such ranking is editorial judgment, not an official award result. A consistent comparison would need to assess each year’s lineup on the same grounds—for example, genre and style variety, how well the nominees represent their release year, cultural and critical resonance, and how closely competitive the games appear. Those criteria require verified rosters and supporting evidence; they cannot be applied reliably to years whose lineups are missing.
The verified 2025 nominee class
The official 2025 Game of the Year nominees were Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Donkey Kong Bananza, Hades II, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. The Game Awards’ official recap names Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as the winner. The Game Awards’ 2025 nominees · The Game Awards’ 2025 recap
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This is a varied slate of six games, but variety alone does not establish that it is stronger than another year’s class. Without comparable, verified lineups for the other years, placing 2025 above or below them would be a subjective ranking presented without the evidence needed to support it.
What the available historical records establish
The official 2020 rewind search result identifies The Last of Us Part II as the Game of the Year winner. The archive page itself redirected to The Game Awards’ current homepage when inspected, so the 2020 nominee roster is not verified here. The Game Awards’ 2020 rewind
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The official nominees archive has a 2024 edition, but the available archive text does not show that year’s Game of the Year nominees. Its existence is not enough to establish the lineup. The Game Awards nominees archive
A general category-history page confirms that Game of the Year is a Game Awards category, but does not supply the complete primary-source year-by-year records needed to compare nominee classes. Game Award for Game of the Year category history
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Why a complete ranking cannot be supported yet
- The 2020–2024 nominee lists and winner comparisons are not established by the available official-page records.
- No comparative critic scores, sales figures, consensus measures, or historical-impact evidence were gathered to support a ranking.
- The 2025 show’s official recap estimates 171 million global livestreams for the full show and says Prime Video viewership was excluded from that figure. That measures estimated reach, not the quality or competitiveness of the nominee class. The Game Awards’ 2025 recap
Without the missing rosters, even a clearly labeled opinion ranking would risk comparing incomplete or misremembered classes. A sound decade-wide list should first verify each year’s nominees and winner against official records, then apply one stated rubric consistently. Until then, the only supported placement is that the 2025 class is verified—not that it ranks first, last, or anywhere between.
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