what the game awards is, and why it matters
The Game Awards nominations reveal is one of the quieter but more consequential moments on the annual gaming calendar. It is the point at which the year's releases are formally sorted into contention, and for PlayStation owners it doubles as a scorecard for how the platform's biggest games landed with critics and peers. The 2025 nominations were revealed on November 17, and the slate remains the reference point for which games came to define the year.
The Game Awards was created by Geoff Keighley in 2014 as a successor to the Spike Video Game Awards, with the explicit goal of building a credible, industry-wide celebration modelled loosely on award shows in film and music. In the decade since, it has grown into the most-watched event of its kind, drawing tens of millions of livestream viewers for the December ceremony and functioning as a de facto season finale for the gaming year.
Two things make it matter for PlayStation fans specifically. First, the nominations and eventual winners shape the conversation around which games are remembered as defining a generation, and PlayStation-published titles have historically featured heavily. Second, the ceremony itself has become a major reveal platform. Publishers, Sony included, routinely use the show to debut trailers and announce release windows, which means the December broadcast is worth watching even for viewers who care little about the trophies themselves.
The 2025 nominations were announced on November 17. The main ceremony followed on December 11 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.
how the voting works
Voting opens immediately after the nominations reveal concludes. The Game Awards uses a hybrid model: a jury of gaming media outlets determines ninety percent of the final result in each category, while public fan votes account for the remaining ten percent. That split is deliberate. It gives critical assessment the decisive weight while still letting the community register enthusiasm, so a game with a passionate following can influence a close race without overriding the professional jury.
In practice this means your vote counts, but it counts as part of a minority share. If there is a PlayStation game you want to champion, voting helps, and it costs nothing but a minute of your time. The categories span Game of the Year, Best Direction, Best Narrative, Best Art Direction, Best Music and Audio and Best Performance, alongside genre awards including Best Action Game, Best RPG and Best Independent Game, plus separate recognition for ongoing live-service titles, esports and content creators.
A practical tip: you do not have to vote in every category. Vote only where you have actually played the nominees. A vote informed by real playtime is more useful than filling in every box for the sake of it.
playstation games in contention
Several PlayStation exclusives and console-defining releases from the eligibility window featured across the 2025 nominations. Astro Bot earned wide critical acclaim for its inventive platform design and its showcase use of the DualSense controller's haptics and adaptive triggers, the kind of first-party polish that tends to travel well with award juries. Helldivers 2 was a commercial phenomenon that helped repopularise co-operative third-person shooting, with community-driven narrative events and a live-service structure that kept it in the conversation long after launch.
Beyond those two, PlayStation releases from the eligibility period tend to surface in genre and technical categories rather than only the marquee races, which is often where the platform's breadth shows most clearly. If you want to catch up on the platform's strongest recent output, our roundups of the best PS5 games of the year so far and the best PS5 single-player games are a good place to start, and the DualSense guide explains why a controller feature like Astro Bot's draws so much attention.
key dates and how to watch
The nominations were announced on November 17, 2025 at 9:00 AM Pacific Time, which is 12:00 PM Eastern and 5:00 PM GMT. The main ceremony broadcast live on December 11, 2025 from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. For 2025 the show streamed simultaneously on YouTube, Twitch and, for the first time, Amazon Prime Video, so viewers could watch across multiple platforms without needing a separate subscription.
| Event | Date | Where to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Nominations reveal | Nov 17, 2025 | YouTube, Twitch |
| Public voting window | Opened after reveal, closed early December | Official TGA website |
| Main ceremony | Dec 11, 2025 | YouTube, Twitch, Prime Video |
how to follow the awards
The ceremony typically runs long, often past three hours, and the biggest reveals and the Game of the Year announcement tend to land in the closing stretch. If you did not watch live, the full stream stays available on demand afterwards, and reveal trailers are usually posted individually within minutes, so it is easy to catch only the announcements you care about. Voting, when it is open, runs through the official Game Awards website; you sign in through a supported account to submit picks, and you can revise them until the window closes.
Whether you voted or simply tuned in, the stretch between the nominations and the December ceremony is among the most watchable few weeks on the gaming calendar, mixing awards with a steady run of trailers and release-window news. For a broader view of the PlayStation event calendar and what else is worth blocking out time for, see our events hub.