The Game Awards 2024 ceremony, hosted by Geoff Keighley at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on 12 December 2024, served as the eleventh annual showcase of the year's best video games and was streamed live across more than thirty online platforms to an audience exceeding 154 million streams — the largest in the event's history at the time (Wikipedia, 2024). Within this landmark ceremony, Grand Theft Auto VI captured the Most Anticipated Game award, beating a strikingly competitive shortlist that included Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, Monster Hunter Wilds and Pokémon Legends: Z-A (Wikipedia, 2024). The win, secured roughly twelve months after the title's first official trailer dropped on 5 December 2023, cemented Rockstar Games' upcoming open-world title as the singular cultural and commercial fixation of the contemporary gaming landscape (Wikipedia, 2025a).
The Most Anticipated Game category at The Game Awards is decided through a hybrid voting system in which a jury panel composed of members from over 130 media outlets globally accounts for 90 per cent of the result, while public voting via the official website and Discord supplies the remaining 10 per cent (Wikipedia, 2024). Roughly 112 million public votes were cast across all categories in 2024, representing a 25 per cent increase over 2023, underscoring the unusual breadth of audience engagement that swept GTA VI to victory (Wikipedia, 2024). The 2024 ceremony was dominated by Astro Bot, which collected four awards including Game of the Year, but the Most Anticipated win for Grand Theft Auto VI arguably generated comparable headlines because it crystallised expectation rather than achievement (Wikipedia, 2024).
The award was significant for several reasons. First, it provided institutional confirmation that GTA VI was already perceived by industry voters as the defining release of the next console cycle, despite the title still being roughly a year away from any tentative release window. Second, it occurred during a period in which the trailer's promotional momentum had not abated: Rockstar's first trailer had broken the record for most first-day views on a non-music YouTube video, accumulating 93 million views within twenty-four hours and surpassing the lifetime viewership of Grand Theft Auto V's reveal trailer within forty-eight hours (Wikipedia, 2025a). Third, the win prefigured a repeat: Grand Theft Auto VI would go on to win Most Anticipated again at The Game Awards 2025, becoming a back-to-back recipient and continuing its parallel run of Most Wanted wins at the Golden Joystick Awards in both years (Wikipedia, 2025a).
The 2024 nominee slate represented some of the most heavily marketed Japanese and Western releases on the horizon, making the GTA VI victory more than a token gesture. Capcom's Monster Hunter Wilds and Nintendo's Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Pokémon Legends: Z-A each commanded large dedicated audiences, while Kojima Productions' Death Stranding 2: On the Beach had been showcased at multiple prior events with bespoke trailers (Wikipedia, 2024). For GTA VI to prevail against this lineup despite Rockstar's notoriously sparse promotional cadence indicated the degree to which a single trailer and a release-window confirmation had saturated industry consciousness.
The award also reflected the broader phenomenon documented by journalists during this period: the so-called "before GTA 6" meme, in which surprising real-world events were jokingly compared against the game's prolonged development, and the related "4D chess" dynamic in which rival publishers reportedly delayed or rescheduled their own releases to avoid colliding with GTA VI's eventual window (Wikipedia, 2025a). Analyst firm DFC Intelligence projected first-year sales of 40 million units and earnings of US$3.2 billion — double Grand Theft Auto V's record-setting launch — including roughly US$1 billion in preorders alone (Wikipedia, 2025a). Against that economic backdrop, the Most Anticipated trophy functioned less as a prediction and more as a ratification of consensus.
Coverage of the ceremony noted that the Most Anticipated category was among the least suspenseful of the night, with multiple outlets describing the GTA VI victory as a foregone conclusion given the trailer's unprecedented reach (Wikipedia, 2024). The Game Awards' official nominee listings confirmed Rockstar Games as the credited developer-publisher on the win card, an unusual instance of the parent label being explicitly foregrounded rather than a particular Rockstar studio (The Game Awards, 2024). Journalists writing about the ceremony generally praised the announcements made during the show — including Elden Ring Nightreign, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and The Witcher IV — but consistently framed GTA VI's Most Anticipated win as the night's emblematic moment for forward-looking hype, separate from the retrospective awards dominated by Astro Bot and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (Wikipedia, 2024).
The 2024 Game Awards Most Anticipated Game win was, in practical terms, a confirmation rather than a surprise, but its symbolic weight was substantial. It signalled that Grand Theft Auto VI had moved from being a long-rumoured sequel into the position of industry centrepiece — an outcome that would be reinforced by the title's repeat win in 2025 and its parallel recognition at the Golden Joystick Awards. The award captured the unique pre-release status of GTA VI: a game whose cultural footprint, by virtue of trailer records, analyst forecasts, and competitive scheduling decisions across the industry, had begun to rival that of already-released titles.
The Game Awards (2024) Most Anticipated Game | Winners | The Game Awards. Available at: https://thegameawards.com/nominees/most-anticipated-game (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2024) The Game Awards 2024. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Awards_2024 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025a) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).