There’s no question that 2025 has been the year of multiplayer. Split Fiction was an instant addition to the co-op canon. Battlefield 6 reinvigorated interest in a once-great first-person shooter. Arc Raiders has come in hot, with the same momentum that Helldivers 2 had last year. Games like Peak and R.E.P.O. have helped popularize an emerging breed of small-scale co-op hits. Hell, even FromSoftware made a pretty solid multiplayer game! All of those examples come together to form the defining trend in video games this year.
But you wouldn’t glean that when looking through this year’s Game Awards nominees. Despite a glut of breakout hits, none of the games I’ve listed above will compete in a very competitive game of the year field. Even Split Fiction is out of the running despite developer Hazelight’s last co-op hit, It Takes Two, winning the grand prize just a few years ago. The lack of multiplayer representation has stirred up some hurt feelings among fans, with content creator Shroud going as far as to say the show is “rigged” due to Arc Raiders failing to receive top honors.
Does this year’s nominee list really reveal a jury bias against multiplayer games? Not really, but it does suggest that the bar is particularly high for ones with Game of the Year ambitions.
The idea that The Game Awards is rigged against multiplayer games is a flawed argument from the outset. It’s immediately busted by the fact that Overwatch, a team-based shooter with no single-player content, won Game of the Year in 2016, while the co-op only It Takes Two won the same award in 2021. Those aren’t exactly outliers either. Hearthstone, Titanfall 2, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate all competed in the category throughout the 2010s.
What is true, though, is that a proper multiplayer game hasn’t been up for the award so far this decade aside from It Takes Two. Games with multiplayer components have been included, like Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Doom: Eternal, but we haven’t seen anything like PUBG compete in a very long time. Story-driven, single-player games are undeniably in fashion among the jury.
You could read that as proof of bias if you’re looking for dots to connect. Nominees have become narrower in recent years, with fewer games getting a shot in top categories as several obvious contenders are shuffled into every eligible field. (Compare this year’s repetitive list with 2017’s, where Nier: Automata, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Cuphead landed nominations in major categories despite missing Game of the Year.) Genre games have suffered as a result of that narrowing, with something like Street Fighter 6 or Forza Horizon 5 never standing a chance, even in technical categories. It’s perhaps a symptom of how mass appeal inevitably flattens consensus once your jury is large enough.
But the reality is that multiplayer games are particularly complicated contenders. A single-player game’s strengths are easier to assess; your thoughts and interpretations may change over time, but you can beat a game over a week and walk away with a firm feel for what it does well. Multiplayer games are shaped by experience and time, and those factors can wildly change what players think of a game from week to week.
Consider a moving target like Arc Raiders. If you’ve been following the buzz around the extraction shooter, you know that a lot of players are walking away from it with memorable community experiences. Tales of “friendly” players who are eager to share loot with one another rather than hoard it paints a picture of a utopian shooter that would be easy to fall in love with. But what if you didn’t experience that? Say that your play sessions have found you logging in, trying to play the role of a friendly player, and only coming up against ultra-competitive jerks who will kill you the second they see you? You might walk away with an entirely different view of Arc Raiders.
That’s always going to make it difficult to find consensus on a multiplayer game. Sometimes, they’re only as fun as the people you’re playing them with. Would I have enjoyed Among Us so much if I hadn’t played with close friends at a very specific moment in time? Would I still like Peak if I was consistently matched with someone who was just terrible at it and stopped me from making any progress? Any jury assessing these games needs to be able to see through moment-to-moment highs and determine whether or not those experiences are a testament to the underlying game or the strength of their friendships.
The bigger obstacle is the time factor. In our modern live-service age, multiplayer games are meant to evolve. The thing you play on day one is rarely going to be the same thing you’re playing on day 100. Sure, Arc Raiders is great out the gate, but players have only had a few weeks with it. What will its first major update look like? Will it get a controversial change that ruins the game in players’ eyes? You can’t truly know how strong a multiplayer game’s foundation is until it’s had time to marinate. Just look at Elden Ring: Nightreign, which underwhelmed at launch but has since gotten robust updates that have proven FromSoftware had a long-term vision.
From that perspective, it makes sense that both Overwatch and PUBG were once major Game of the Year contenders. Overwatch launched in May 2016 and PUBG entered early access in March 2017. The Game Awards jury got significant time with each game, watching how each evolved and getting a variety of experiences to understand the depth of each. These weren’t knee-jerk nominations based on a few fun weeks of play; both of those games stood the test of time in their respective years and earned their spots.
Even then, one could argue that the jury still didn’t have enough time to evaluate them. Overwatch suffered some major reputational losses down the line as Blizzard shifted resources to a sequel, slowing the pace of updates to a crawl. Its Game of the Year win has become a butt of the joke for some since 2016 who only see the win divorced from the context of the time. PUBG’s nomination has aged more questionably, as the battle royale game fell off a cliff come 2018 as Fortnite proved to be the more significant variation on the formula in the long run. It doesn’t have a Game of the Year nomination to show for it, but its continued dominance in Best Ongoing Game proves that multiplayer games are slippery beasts.
So, what does it take for a multiplayer game to break through? Previous nominees tell us that it takes a generational effort whose long-term influence is immediately apparent. Even a few months into its life, players had a sense that Overwatch was going to usher in a new age of hero shooters. Hearthstone, a March 2014 release, felt like a groundbreaking deckbuilder on day one. PUBG invented an entire genre that had companies racing to make quick copycats. It’s a ridiculously high bar that story-driven, single-player games don’t always have to reach. You don’t see anyone clamoring to ape Deathloop, nor do you hear its name mentioned much at all these days.
Is that a little unfair? Perhaps, but we have plenty of historical flash-in-the-pan examples that remind us why it’s important to assess multiplayer games with patience. Remember when The Finals was the hot new shooter for a week? Or when Halo Infinite was hailed as a series-redefining return to greatness in the wake of its release? Or just Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout in general? Had any of those games rode their breakout moments to the Game Awards hall of fame, they would have become running jokes that viewers would never let go of.
The Game Awards jury could certainly stand to diversify its choices, but it’s far from a “rigged” process. We don’t yet know if something like Arc Raiders is going to redefine shooters or fade out in a month, no matter what a hyped-up content creator says after streaming it for a few days.
