👑 The Most Awarded Games of All Time

Every December the same ritual: one show, one winner, one trophy. And every December half the internet disagrees. The interesting question is not who won the big gala — it is which game the entire trade press picked, from the giant sites down to the two-person blog in Estonia.

Somebody actually did that counting. Meta Awards has documented 8,959 Game of the Year awards from 3,364 outlets across 100 countries, covering 2000 to today — and reconstructed the years 2003 to 2021 from archived sources. That turns a matter of opinion into a countable one.

The numbers show how little consensus there really is: in 2024 the five biggest award shows crowned three different games. And the all-time leader is not one of the usual suspects — Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 collected 544 awards, ahead of Elden Ring and The Last of Us Part II.

One caveat the source itself insists on, and it matters: raw totals cannot be compared across years. The number of tracked outlets grew enormously, so a 2025 game competes for far more possible awards than a 2011 game. Skyrim’s 230 are worth more than they look. Read the list as “these were the consensus games of their year”, not as a fair race between decades.

Below are the fifteen most awarded games in that order, enriched with our own data — rating, playtime and, where it applies, whether you can play them together. Award counts from Meta Awards; for a single year in full, their season pages list every outlet that voted.

See the full all-time ranking on Meta Awards →