These Five Titles That May Challenge <em>GTA 6</em> for the 2026 Top Honor Award.

A year ago, we wondered if anything could potentially outshine Grand Theft Auto 6 for the 2025's Game of the Year honor — "barring Rockstar's capacity to ship it on target." Ultimately, it was precisely that that took Rockstar's much-hyped game from the running, with delays to May and, later, November 2026 opening the door for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's unprecedented dominance at The 2025 Game Awards.

Therefore, peering into the future to GOTY 2026, we are situated with a distinct sense of déjà vu. Once again, GTA 6 starts the year as the obvious frontrunner to claim the highest honor. Again, Rockstar's primary adversary could be its own schedule. Although another delay at this juncture is more improbable, it's definitely still plausible, and with its present Nov. 19 release date just squeaking into The Game Awards' standard eligibility window, it would only take a slide of a couple of days or more to send GTA 6 into competition for the 2027 awards.

Yet again, GTA 6 seems extremely difficult to defeat, but far from impossible. Rockstar's own Red Dead Redemption 2 was edged out for GOTY by Sony Santa Monica's God of War in 2018, while GTA 5 was overshadowed in most awards ceremonies and GOTY votes — although not the Game Awards' earlier incarnation, VGX — by The Last of Us. In fact, GTA 6's behemoth status is a paradoxical kind of vulnerability, as critics and awards juries will be actively looking for an attractive alternative storyline to latch onto in order to maintain suspense.

So what alternative games might be in contention? Predicting nominees this early in the year is, frankly, a bit of a speculative endeavor: the ecosystem of indie and smaller releases is very uncertain, while bigger games often get postponed or don't pan out, and certain publishers (like Nintendo) have yet to reveal their titles for the second half of the year. Still, there are already a handful of 2026 releases that appear to be they will be strong contenders. Here are five that stand a good chance of being nominated together with GTA 6.

1. Resonant Control

Remedy Entertainment's surreal follow-up is easily the most potent challenger to GTA 6's dominance. Truly, Remedy might be the perfect Game Awards studio: It creates technically accomplished, graphically impressive, narratively sophisticated action-adventure games while functioning just adequately outside the industry establishment to still retain the aura of an outsider. The original Control earned eight nominations and one win in 2019, while Alan Wake 2 ran Baldur's Gate 3 a close second in 2023, transforming three of its eight selections into wins in the prestigious Game Direction, Narrative, and Art Direction categories. After a spectacular trailer unveiling at the 2025 Awards, Control Resonant is far from being underestimated.

2. Resident Evil: Requiem

A fresh (or, similarly) remade Resident Evil game is has a higher probability to be nominated for Game of the Year than to be absent. This venerable series has an sterling recent record at The Game Awards — Resident Evil 2 was nominated for the main prize in 2019, Village in 2021, and 4 in 2023 — plus a well-earned reputation for consistent quality. It must be said, a win would be a considerably more improbable proposition, but you can count on Capcom finding itself in the mix.

3. Marvel’s Wolverine

The Wolverine game from Insomniac is one of the most significant sales prospects of the year, and in terms of production cost and technical prowess, almost certainly one of the handful that will be able to give GTA 6 a serious competition. In the vein of Resident Evil, Insomniac's slick Marvel games franchise is excellent at accumulating lots of nominations at The Game Awards, and not as successful at turning them into wins. Will the shift from Spider-Man to an darker character and (much) more visceral action shift the odds in Wolverine's favor? Possibly, and it will be Sony's top contender for the year, which virtually secures it a spot at the table.

4. Fortune's Weave (Fire Emblem)

Nintendo is seldom absent from the list of Game of the Year nominees. Lacking a obvious idea of what its major 2026 game will be (a new core Pokémon and a 3D Mario game are both rumored), Fortune’s Weave makes a compelling placeholder. Fire Emblem is a specialist series, it's true, but it has been building consistently in both popularity and regard over the past few years, while its involved anime storytelling style and turn-based combat get more popular and closer to the gaming mainstream by the day. It wouldn't be a revelation.

5. The Blood of Dawnwalker

The expanding European voting group on the jury is steadily making its presence felt, especially when it comes to nominating epic, sprawling Euro role-playing games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Rebel Wolves' first game is an ideal game to capture those votes and fill this slot, particularly given the Witcher 3 heritage of its developers — and its strong parallels to that 2015 GOTY winner.

Concerning the Indies?

The obvious gap in our list is that it omits an indie contender. While The Game Awards jury usually only nominates one indie game for Game of the Year — 2025's trio of indie picks looks like a anomaly — it also hardly ever fails to nominate one. It's nearly impossible to foresee what that game might be at this point, as the biggest indie games of each year often come out of the blue, but a few potential candidates would be:

• Mixtape: a music-driven, retro road trip of a game published by the tastemakers at Annapurna Interactive.
• Replaced: a long-awaited cyberpunk adventure with a exquisitely detailed pixel-art aesthetic.
• Ontos: Frictional Games' enigmatic follow-up to the Amnesia series (provided it's not overly horrifying).
• Slay the Spire 2: follow-up to the immensely popular roguelike deckbuilder (but it might not make it out of early access in 2026).
• Mina the Hollower: Yacht Club Games' Shovel Knight next project, an enchanting-looking retro Zelda homage (if the studio can finally finish it).

Other Challengers

• Gears of War: E-Day: One of two massive franchise revivals from Xbox Game Studios in 2026, E-Day will have to prove that this very 2000s series is still meaningful.
• Fable: After