Entertainment
2025 Gaming Award Nominations Discriminate Against Discrimanatory Hiring Practices
By Jennifer Asencio
| Published
This week, the Gaming Awards announced the 2025 nominees for the best games of the year and the people who produce them. The Gaming Awards are like the Oscars for video games and everything related to them. The nominations are made by industry insiders and made public for fans to vote on the eventual winners. The awards were founded by gaming journalist Geoff Keighley, who hosts the awards show every December.
Just like their movie and television counterparts, the Gaming Awards have categories that cover a variety of functions in the production of a game. Typical categories are included, like Best Narrative for storytelling, Best Performance for the voice actors, and Best Art Direction for the games’ basic appearance. There are also adjacent categories, like Best Adaptation, which includes shows and movies adapted from video games. This year’s nominees in that category include The Last of Us 2 and A Minecraft Movie.
Indie studios cleaned up in the video game categories, especially Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The visually gorgeous role-playing game received 12 nominations, including Game of the Year, marking the highest number of nominations earned by a single game. It was also a year for sequels, with many of the nominees being the second game of a series: Hades 2, Death Standing 2, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Hollow Knight: Silksong and Donkey Kong Bonanza round out the Game of the Year nominations. Also notable was Ghost of Yokai, which earned seven nominations.
The advisory board that nominates the games across all categories is composed of professionals in the industry, including studios like EA, Ubisoft, and Valve. AAA gaming has experienced a lot of upheaval over the past year, with many anticipated titles failing because of activism inserted into their storylines.
An advocacy group that tried to normalize discriminatory hiring practices was found to have involvement in a lot of games, compromising those projects and leading to mass layoffs in the same studios that form the advisory board. The fact that they voted against their own games in favor of new studios is a sign that the big studios might finally return to form.
Now that the nominations are in, it’s up to fans to do the rest. Voting has begun and will continue until December 10, 2025. The awards show live-streams on December 11, 2025, at 7:30 pm EST. With the fans making the final picks over the next few weeks, it’s anyone’s guess which game will take home the prize, although Expedition 33 seems poised to run away with it.
