The nominees for this year’s Game Awards have been revealed, and the discourse surrounding who has been nominated for what and which games have been omitted entirely is in full swing. Pour one out for Xbox while you get stuck into that discourse, as for the 15th year in a row, there are no Xbox exclusives among the Game of the Year nominees.
Let’s get this out of the way early, before you all race to the comments section – yes, Psychonauts 2 was nominated in 2021, but even though it was published by Xbox, it was not an Xbox exclusive, as it was released on PS4 on the same day.
While there’s plenty of Xbox exclusive representation in other categories, including South of Midnight which is up for the Games for Impact award, and Troy Baker’s nomination for his performance as Indiana Jones in The Great Circle, none of the six games that are up for Game of the Year are published by Xbox.
As highlighted by Nick_Marseil on Twitter, this has unfortunately become the norm. The graphic shows which PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox exclusives have been nominated for Game of the Year between 2013 and 2025. The scorecard currently reads 15 games in 13 years for PlayStation, 12 nominations for Nintendo, and zero for Xbox.
PlayStation has won four GOTY awards during that period, while Nintendo has only managed one, the 2017 award for Breath of the Wild.
What Were The Last Xbox Exclusives Nominated For Game Of The Year?
Xbox’s GOTY nomination drought extends back so far that it predates The Game Awards as we know them today, which started in 2014. Before then, they were known as the Spike Video Game Awards. Even then, you have to go all the way back to 2010 to find a year in which any games that were exclusively available on Xbox at launch were nominated to win Game of the Year.
That year, there were two – Halo: Reach, which remains an Xbox exclusive, and Mass Effect 2, which originally launched on Xbox 360 and didn’t come to PS3 until 2011. Despite both of those games being all-timers – I said what I said – neither of them took home the award that year. They both lost out to Red Dead Redemption. If you’ve never played it before, good news. The Rockstar classic has been remastered and will be released on all major platforms, including Netflix, very soon.
2026 might be the year that Xbox finally breaks its GOTY nominee curse with some huge titles promised for the next calendar year. Halo: Campaign Evolved, Fable, Gears of War: E-Day, and Forza Horizon 6 will all launch in 2026 if all goes to plan. The trouble is, with the exception of Forza Horizon 6, it’s extremely likely that all of those games launch day and date on PS5, which means they won’t be Xbox exclusives. That means there’s a chance, arguably a very strong one, that Reach and Mass Effect 2 are the last Xbox exclusives to ever receive GOTY nominations.
