Polymarket has opened up betting on The Game Awards 2025 and no one seems to have a doubt that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will take top honors at Geoff Keighley’s showcase. The odds are so stacked in the French RPG’s favor that a $100 bet on Hollow Knight: Silksong would net you over $1,000 if it actually ended up winning game of the year instead.
Gambling on the 2025 GOTY race opened up on Polymarket on October 29, well in advance of anyone actually voting on what game will actually win has even begun. The Best Game category is decided by media ballots (90 percent) and fan voting (10 percent) with the winner revealed during the live show on December 11.
Nominees are chosen in November followed by a final round of voting. While it’s Keighley’s show, he doesn’t participate in any part of the selection process. Also, full disclosure, Kotaku has never participated in voting and nothing in this article should be mistaken for financial advice (that’s a thing you’re supposed to write, right?)
With all of those wrinkles in mind, the first 48 hours of the GOTY race on Polymarket were interesting to witness. While Clair Obscur is currently leading with bets suggesting an 80 percent chance of winning, it didn’t start out that way. It was actually Silksong who was the frontrunner in the initial hour after the market opened. Whoever was betting first must have been all in on the Metroidvania hype.
Polymarket / Kotaku
But it didn’t take long for the pack of frontrunners, which also included Death Stranding 2 and Hades 2, to fall way behind Sandfall Interactive’s surprise turn-based hit. All of those other games are not currently trending in the single-digits. Silksong is second with 8 percent, Hades 2 is third with 5 percent, and Death Stranding only has 3 percent. Over $75,000 has been wagered so far.
From there Split Fiction, The Oute Worlds 2, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Donkey Kong Bananza, Elden Ring: Nightreign, and Blue Prince all have at least a percentage point. Ghost of Yotei and every other game that came out this year, on the other hand, are all at decimal points. Shockingly, there is over $900 of betting volume on Grand Theft Auto 6, a game which is not coming out this year. I guess someone didn’t get the memo.
The Clair Obscur GOTY train keeps chugging along
What can we make of all this? Remember, prediction markets aren’t an indication of what will happen, they’re a measure of what people think might happen. The complete domination of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 could mean that lots of people played it and think it’s great, or it could just mean people who like placing wagers on Polymarket are seeing how jazzed everyone else is about the game and trying to refine that online noise into quantifiable signals.
Polygon‘s Oli Welsh, who maintains a rolling list of GOTY frontrunners based on a mix of experience, vibes, and data, has had Clair Obscur in the lead for a while. Maybe Polymarket users are taking their cues from him! One of the only variations from the current betting landscape is that he has Yotei in closer contention, even if it’s still an outside shot. If you look at Metacritic, however, Hades 2 technically has a higher composite review score from all of the aggregated critics. Those are the people who do most of the voting, after all.
The actual mechanics of how various outlets vote, from magazines like Game Informer to YouTube groups like Easy Allies, probably play an even bigger role in deciding the outcome than ambient industry vibes. Some ballots are decided on purely by the head of those outlets. Others do informal internal voting. Some might make choices based on what they think is supposed to be the right answer, just like the Polymarket folks are doing. Others might decide based purely on what the most people at that outlet played and liked. Often passion carries the day. Five people really liking game X might not carry the day against three who think Y is the most important game of the decade.
Will that messy, inconsistent process yield Clair Obscur as the winner this year? The users on Polymarket clearly think so. We won’t know until the paper envelope is opened on stage by the makers of last year’s winner, Astro Bot.
