On 11 December 2025, Grand Theft Auto VI won the Most Anticipated Game award at The Game Awards 2025, the twelfth edition of the ceremony hosted by Geoff Keighley at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles (Wikipedia, 2025a). The victory marked the second consecutive year that Rockstar Games' upcoming title had claimed the trophy, having previously won at The Game Awards 2024. With this back-to-back triumph, Grand Theft Auto VI joined a very short list of titles to win the category in successive years, equalling Elden Ring, which secured the same distinction at the 2020 and 2021 ceremonies (Wikipedia, 2025a). The win also reinforced the cultural status of the project, which by late 2025 had been delayed twice and was scheduled for release on 19 November 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S (Wikipedia, 2025b).
The Most Anticipated Game category at The Game Awards 2025 placed Grand Theft Auto VI against an unusually competitive slate of unreleased projects. The official nominee list comprised 007 First Light (IO Interactive), Grand Theft Auto VI (Rockstar Games), Marvel's Wolverine (Insomniac Games / Sony Interactive Entertainment), Resident Evil Requiem (Capcom), and The Witcher IV (CD Projekt Red) (The Game Awards, 2025). The line-up was striking in that every contender represented either a flagship sequel, a long-anticipated reboot, or a marquee adaptation, underscoring how broad and high-profile the field had become. As with other categories, the winner was determined by a blend of jury votes (90 percent) and public voting via the official website and Discord (10 percent), with public voting closing on 10 December (Wikipedia, 2025a).
Wikipedia's editors noted that Grand Theft Auto VI became "the second game to win Most Anticipated Game twice consecutively, after Elden Ring in 2020 and 2021" (Wikipedia, 2025a). The achievement is notable on three fronts. First, the category is structurally biased against repeat winners: nominees rotate as games release, so retaining the trophy requires the title to remain unreleased and yet still command more enthusiasm than freshly revealed competitors. Second, Grand Theft Auto VI's win came in a year in which Rockstar had endured significant turbulence, including the firing of 34 employees in late October 2025 amid union-busting allegations and a second delay pushing the release into late 2026 (Wikipedia, 2025b). That voters and the jury continued to back the project despite these controversies illustrates the depth of consumer and industry anticipation. Third, the victory aligned with broader industry signals: Grand Theft Auto VI had earlier won Most Wanted Game at the 2024 and 2025 Golden Joystick Awards, and its second trailer (May 2025) had surpassed Deadpool & Wolverine as the biggest video launch ever, accumulating more than 475 million views across platforms within 24 hours (Wikipedia, 2025b).
The 2025 ceremony itself was dominated by Sandfall Interactive's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which collected nine wins from thirteen nominations, the most in the show's history, including Game of the Year (Wikipedia, 2025a). Against that backdrop, the Most Anticipated category functioned as a forward-looking counterweight to the awards honouring released titles, signalling which unreleased projects had captured the cultural imagination heading into 2026. The show was viewed across more than 171 million streams—a record for the ceremony—meaning the Grand Theft Auto VI announcement reached one of the largest audiences in the franchise's award history (Wikipedia, 2025a). Rockstar's continued silence on gameplay details made the win effectively a reaffirmation of consumer faith based on two trailers, the second of which had only deepened expectations.
The win was framed in the press as unsurprising but symbolically important. Coverage emphasised that Grand Theft Auto VI had become the benchmark against which other publishers schedule their releases, with Bloomberg's Jason Schreier describing the industry's manoeuvring around the title as "a massive game of 4D chess playing out across the entire video-game industry" (Wikipedia, 2025b). The category win therefore operates not merely as a popularity contest but as a public confirmation of Grand Theft Auto VI's gravitational pull on release calendars, marketing strategies, and analyst forecasts—DFC Intelligence had already projected first-year sales of 40 million units and $3.2 billion in earnings (Wikipedia, 2025b). The "before GTA 6" meme, which spread widely throughout 2024 and 2025 to express disbelief that other notable events were occurring before the game's launch, captured the same sentiment in vernacular form (Wikipedia, 2025b).
The 2025 Most Anticipated Game win was a logical but historically meaningful outcome. Grand Theft Auto VI defeated a roster of major franchises to retain the trophy for a second straight year, an accomplishment previously achieved only by Elden Ring. The award arrived during a turbulent year for Rockstar—delays, layoffs, and an Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain dispute—yet voters and jurors signalled that anticipation for the title had, if anything, intensified. As the game moves toward its November 2026 release date, the back-to-back Most Anticipated wins stand as the clearest awards-circuit measure of just how singular its expected cultural and commercial impact remains.
The Game Awards (2025) Most Anticipated Game – Winners. Available at: https://thegameawards.com/nominees/most-anticipated-game (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025a) The Game Awards 2025. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Awards_2025 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).