Say it with me now: 2025 has been a great year for video games. We’re roughly halfway through, and I’ve already played plenty of serious contenders for Game of the Year, and too many more that I still need to make time for. This doesn’t happen every year.
I still remember the long drought between God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, so I don’t take getting Citizen Sleeper 2, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Oblivion Remastered, Donkey Kong Bananza, Mario Kart World, Death Stranding 2, Split Fiction, and Blue Prince in the first half of the same year for granted.
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But now we’re more than halfway through 2025, what big question marks remain? What games yet to come could end up dominating the conversation come December? Have the biggest hitters already slapped us silly? Or could a heavyweight still lay in wait? Let’s take a look.
The Solid Contenders
This is the domain of the hotly anticipated sequel. Video games might be the only medium where sequels are routinely better than their predecessors, and GOTY nominations tend to bear that out, year after year. Since The Game Awards began in 2014, seven sequels have taken home the top prize, in contrast to four originals. Meanwhile, 42 sequels have been nominated for GOTY, while 18 originals have secured a nod.
I’m using sequels broadly, to mean any game that isn’t the first game in a franchise. So, while Super Mario Maker was the first Super Mario Maker game, I count it as a sequel because there had been many Mario games before it. Same goes for remakes.
So, it seems fair to expect the rest of the games scheduled for 2025 to follow that same pattern. The five unreleased games that I suspect have the best chance of securing a game of the year nomination are: Ghost Of Yōtei, The Outer Worlds 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. I know the last one is a remake, but you get what I mean.
Ghost of Yotei is, arguably, the biggest game still to come in 2025. It slid into the slot that many expected GTA 6 to occupy, it’s the sequel to a blockbuster release, and it’s Sony’s most-anticipated game of the year. If it’s good, GOTY talk will begin immediately.
The Outer Worlds 2 likewise looks bigger and better than the original, and the first Obsidian RPG scored a nod back in 2019. Seems like a no-brainer for a nom, right? The only obstacle I can see The Outer Worlds 2 running into is that there are plenty of other no-brainers vying for such a spot.
If Hollow Knight: Silksong comes out this year, it’s a shoe-in. The only question is whether or not the long-gestating Metroidvania actually does make an appearance.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond looks awesome, moody, and like a great showcase for the graphical power and Mouse Mode-enhanced blasting of the Switch 2. That it will also be available on the original Switch only helps its chances as more nominators will have a chance to play it. Now just hurry up and give us a release date
And Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, the wildcard on this list. Remakes have only secured a few nominations since TGA started in 2014, and all of those remakes have belonged to two series: Resident Evil and Final Fantasy. If the Snake Eater remake is good, it could edge its way in. But it’s a long shot.
The Triple-A Games That Probably Won’t Get Awards Attention
Though sequels tend to dominate, that status alone is not enough to earn a nomination. Case in point: here are several big triple-A sequels set to release in the back half of the year that have little chance of breaking into the GOTY race.
- Mafia: The Old Country
- Dying Light: The Beast
- Borderlands 4
- Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7
- Kirby Air Riders
- Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment
Mafia: The Old Country looks mediocre. Add in that it’s the latest entry in a series that has always been on the bubble — never quite beloved, never especially popular — and I don’t see this one breaking in.
Dying Light: The Beast is confusing. Is it a DLC? Is it a standalone release? The answer is that it’s a standalone release that started out as a DLC, but I’m betting on all but the Dying Light faithful being too confused to even play it.
Borderlands 4 looks like it could be a marked improvement over Borderlands 3 on the story front, with enough gameplay improvements to keep things interesting. But Borderlands has never been nominated, and I don’t see enough here to change that.
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Kirby Air Riders is a kart racer and kart racers never get nominated outside of the Best Family Game category. Even if a kart racer was going to be nominated, Mario Kart World would be the one to do it.
And finally, the last two Hyrule Warriors games didn’t make the cut, and Musou games are rarely taken seriously as awards contenders, so I don’t see Age of Imprisonment getting in either.
The Double-A Games That Could Be Major Steps Up
Silent Hill 2 really changed many players’ perceptions of Bloober Team. With Cronos: The New Dawn, the studio is building on the third-person horror-action gameplay of Silent Hill 2 with an original sci-fi adventure in the vein of Resident Evil 4. Sounds pretty good!
Two 2019 jankfests are back with a vengeance six years later. Greedfall 2: The Dying World and The Sinking City 2 are both following up on cult hits that found an audience at the end of the last decade. Neither was a massive hit, but critics praised both as promising, frustratingly flawed first steps. Neither has a hard release date yet, beyond a general ‘2025’, though, so both might slip to next year. But if they do launch, 2025 could be the year that Spiders and Frogwares break through to the mainstream.
Though Greedfall 2’s early access reviews don’t point to that kind of breakthrough hit, at least not yet.
Little Nightmares 3 is a weird case. It’s a sequel, but also the first game in the horror series developed by Supermassive, taking over from original dev Tarsier. The Until Dawn creators could bring the series an infusion of new life, or miss what made the previous entries so beloved. We’ll have to wait and see.
The Indies That Probably Won’t Get The Attention They Deserve
The first outing from Yacht Club Games that doesn’t have ‘Shovel Knight’ somewhere in the title, Mina The Hollower looks like a breath of fresh air. With a Game Boy Color-inspired look and Zelda-inspired gameplay, it will be a welcome break from ceaseless games starring that blue knight and his silly shovel. But indies have a tough time breaking into the GOTY conversation. Since 2014, only a few have cracked TGA’s list, and they tend to be year-defining hits like Celeste or Balatro.
Mouse: PI For Hire— which is Cuphead meets Dusk — and Skate Story — which is Tony Hawk’s meets Thumper — face the same stacked deck. Both look cool as hell, though, and in the case of Skate Story’s underworld shredding, I mean that literally.
The Triple-A Games That Have Major Obstacles
In this last category, we have two games that I hope will end up being good, but can see being terrible.
Look, I loved Pokemon as a kid, too. But as an adult? There just hasn’t been much there for me. Pokemon Legends: Z-A could change that, but it still kinda looks like a GameCube game. A Pokemon title has never scored a TGA GOTY nom, and it would be a huge surprise if Z-A changes anything on that front.
Meanwhile, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has had a long, tortuous road to release. Originally announced all the way back in 2019, the long-awaited sequel to Troika’s 2004 cult hit changed hands from original developer Hardsuit Labs to The Chinese Room back in 2021. The game’s vision changed in the process, shifting from a hardcore, crunchathon in the vein of the original to a more streamlined RPG adventure. Fans are skeptical, to say the least. I’m holding out hope if only because, at this point, the game actually coming out will be a victory.
These games could all make The Game Awards’ list if they’re good enough. But, if covering games for the past seven years has taught me anything, it’s that often the games that define a year come out of nowhere. Oblivion Remastered was shadowdropped and Clair Obscur surprised everyone but the most hardcore RPG fans. Did any of you know what Blue Prince was a year ago? Yeah, me neither. The only safe bet is that there are no safe bets.
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