If you're asking did Elden Ring win Game of the Year, the short answer is yes — and not just once. FromSoftware's open-world action RPG cleaned up across the 2022 awards season and picked up GOTY wins from several of the biggest award bodies in gaming. The reason this still gets asked in 2026 is pretty simple: Elden Ring never really left the conversation. Between Shadow of the Erdtree, Elden Ring Nightreign, and the usual mix-up between nominations, DLC awards, and main GOTY wins, it's easy to lose track of what actually happened.

This article sticks to the important part: where Elden Ring won, where it didn't, and why the answer is still a little messy years later.

Did Elden Ring Win Game of the Year

Yes, definitively. Elden Ring won Game of the Year at four of the five major award bodies that matter most in these discussions. Here's where it took the top prize.

The Game Awards 2022 gave Elden Ring its highest-profile GOTY win. The ceremony took place in December 2022, and FromSoftware's game beat a very strong field: God of War Ragnarök, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Stray, A Plague Tale: Requiem, and Horizon Forbidden West. The ending of that show got weird because of the stage invader, but the result itself was never in doubt. If you only remember one Elden Ring GOTY win, it's probably this one, because The Game Awards is still the most visible gaming awards show in the world.

The Golden Joystick Awards 2022 also handed Elden Ring the Ultimate Game of the Year award. That one matters for a different reason. Golden Joystick has a much stronger public voting element, so the win showed Elden Ring wasn't just a critics' darling or a hardcore Souls audience favorite — it had real mainstream pull.

The DICE Awards 2023, run by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, awarded Elden Ring Outstanding Achievement in Game of the Year. DICE tends to carry serious industry weight because the voting comes from people working in games. Elden Ring also earned additional nominations there in technical and design categories, which helps explain why the game wasn't just admired for scale or popularity. It was respected across disciplines.

The GDC Awards 2023 gave Elden Ring another Game of the Year win, and this one is especially prestigious in its own way because it's voted on by developers. That's peer recognition, not just audience enthusiasm or media consensus. For a game to build a huge open world and still keep FromSoftware's trademark combat tension intact, then get rewarded by other devs for it, is a big deal.

Elden Ring GOTY Record by Award Show

Here is Elden Ring's record across the five major GOTY award bodies:

Award Show	Year	GOTY Result
The Game Awards	2022	Winner
Golden Joystick Awards	2022	Winner
DICE Awards	2023	Winner
GDC Awards	2023	Winner
BAFTA Game Awards	2023	Lost (to Vampire Survivors)

The one clear miss in Elden Ring's near-sweep was the BAFTA Game Awards. BAFTA gave Best Game to Vampire Survivors in 2023, which surprised plenty of players at the time but honestly fits BAFTA's history pretty well. BAFTA has a habit of rewarding inventive, disruptive games that bend design expectations, especially when they come from smaller-scale projects. Vampire Survivors, a bullet-heaven roguelite built largely by a single developer, checked that box perfectly. It's the same kind of curveball energy that led BAFTA to pick What Remains of Edith Finch over The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild back in 2017.

Elden Ring still picked up the Grand Award at the Japan Game Awards, which mattered a lot domestically and reinforced just how important FromSoftware had become in Japan's own industry landscape. On top of that, major outlets like IGN, GameSpot, Eurogamer, and PC Gamer all named Elden Ring their GOTY. Put all of that together, and it was one of the most complete critical sweeps we've seen in modern gaming.

Why Players Ask "Did Elden Ring Win Game of the Year"

A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that "Elden Ring" can mean a few different things now, depending on when someone started paying attention.

The biggest source of confusion is the base game versus Shadow of the Erdtree. The DLC launched in June 2024 and got the kind of reception that immediately restarted the "is Elden Ring the best game out there?" conversation. Some players saw that wave of praise and assumed the expansion itself was in the running for main GOTY awards. It wasn't. Shadow of the Erdtree was treated as expansion content, not a standalone game, so it picked up DLC-specific recognition at various outlets rather than competing for the main Game of the Year prize.

Then there's Elden Ring Nightreign, which is probably the biggest reason the question keeps resurfacing in 2026. Nightreign, released in 2025, is not just "more Elden Ring." It's a separate co-op roguelite-style spin-off with a session-based structure, even if it shares the universe and branding. In 2026, Nightreign was nominated for Best Multiplayer at the BAFTA Game Awards, where it lost to Arc Raiders. So when players see "Elden Ring" show up at a 2026 ceremony, they're not looking at the original 2022 game making another GOTY run. They're looking at a different release in a different category.

Another reason is simpler: nominee does not mean winner. Elden Ring showed up on so many shortlists in 2022 and 2023 that some people remember the nominations more than the outcomes. That's fair. But in the biggest ceremonies outside BAFTA, it didn't just get nominated — it won.

The last mix-up is between sales success and awards success. Elden Ring sold incredibly well and topped NPD Group dollar-sales charts in four of its first five months in 2022. That's huge, but it isn't the same thing as winning GOTY. Plenty of games sell well without dominating awards season. Elden Ring did both, and that's part of why its 2022 run felt so massive.

Elden Ring vs Other Game of the Year Winners

2022 Award Rivals

The 2022 GOTY race was stacked, which makes Elden Ring's win record more impressive, not less. God of War Ragnarök was the obvious heavyweight challenger and, for a lot of players, the only game that felt capable of stopping Elden Ring. It had blockbuster presentation, strong character work, and a finale that landed emotionally for a lot of people. Even so, it came up short at The Game Awards and other major ceremonies. It still performed very well in secondary categories and was all over PlayStation-focused awards.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was Nintendo's strongest contender that year, backed by a huge JRPG scope and a story that hit hard for its audience. Stray became one of the year's biggest viral hits and did especially well in indie-focused conversations. A Plague Tale: Requiem also deserves mention, because it showed how far a AA-scale narrative game could push in terms of production value and emotional impact. All of them were serious nominees. None of them took the top prize away from Elden Ring.

2025–2026 Comparison

By the 2025–2026 cycle, the awards landscape looked very different. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, from Sandfall Interactive, became the breakout giant of that season. It won The Game Awards 2025, the Golden Joystick Awards, the DICE Awards, the GDC Awards, and then the BAFTA Game Awards 2026. That made it only the second game ever to complete the full five-major-award GOTY sweep, joining Baldur's Gate 3.

At the BAFTA Game Awards 2026 in London on April 17, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Best Game, Best Debut Game, and Best Performer in a Leading Role for Jennifer English as Maelle. Meanwhile, Elden Ring Nightreign was nominated for Best Multiplayer and lost to Arc Raiders, Embark Studios' extraction shooter, which had already won Best Multiplayer at The Game Awards 2025. That contrast matters. Elden Ring's original release nearly swept everything in 2022, while Nightreign, despite carrying the same brand, was competing in a narrower lane and didn't win its category.

Elden Ring Awards Legacy in 2026

Looking at it from 2026, Elden Ring's awards legacy is still enormous. Before Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took over the record, Elden Ring was the most-awarded game in the industry's history. It piled up honors from critics, award bodies, and developers across the world. That record doesn't belong to it anymore, but the standard it set was very real, and for a while it looked untouchable.

The game also changed FromSoftware's status in a way that's hard to overstate. Before Elden Ring, the studio was already deeply respected because of Dark Souls and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, but that respect was still tied more to hardcore circles than full mainstream dominance. Elden Ring changed that. After 2022, FromSoftware wasn't just the studio that made brutally good action RPGs. It was one of the industry's top-tier developers, period.

The effect of the DLC and spin-off is a little more complicated. Shadow of the Erdtree kept Elden Ring in the critical spotlight through 2024 without putting the base game back into the main GOTY race. Nightreign then extended the brand's awards relevance into 2025 and 2026, showing that the Elden Ring name still carried serious weight years after launch. A BAFTA nomination for Nightreign in its first eligible year doesn't mean it matched the original game's awards run, but it does show the IP still has prestige.

And that's really why this question still matters in 2026. Elden Ring has become a benchmark game. When newer titles like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 put together huge award seasons, people compare them against Elden Ring almost automatically. The funny part is that Elden Ring came incredibly close to the full five-show sweep but missed it because BAFTA went with Vampire Survivors. At the time, that felt like a small wrinkle in an otherwise dominant run. Now that full sweeps are becoming a shorthand for all-time awards greatness, that one BAFTA loss stands out a lot more.

Conclusion

Did Elden Ring win Game of the Year? Absolutely. It won at The Game Awards 2022, Golden Joystick Awards 2022, DICE Awards 2023, and GDC Awards 2023. The only major holdout was BAFTA, which gave its top prize to Vampire Survivors instead.

If you're weighing which wins mattered most, The Game Awards was the biggest in terms of visibility, while GDC may be the most respected from a pure peer-recognition angle. Either way, Elden Ring's legacy is secure. It pushed FromSoftware into a different tier, helped drag the soulslike formula fully into mainstream GOTY territory, and stayed relevant long enough for its DLC and spin-off to keep the name in awards conversations years later.