👑 The Most Awarded Games of All Time

Published 1 September 2026 · list data as of 16 October 2026

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, our sister project, 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 →