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Clair Obscur’s Game Awards sweep is like Moonlight doing an Oppenheimer

Image: Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive

When Moonlight won the 2017 Academy Award for Best Picture, it was a sensational story for two reasons. The first was that it had snatched the award from the favorite La La Land in a race so close that it had somehow culminated in the wrong winner being mistakenly announced on stage. The second was that A24, Moonlight’s upstart independent film studio, had just kicked down the door to Hollywood’s inner sanctum — a space usually ruled by the major studios and their prestige labels.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s triumph at Thursday’s Game Awards was much less dramatic. It was the overwhelming favourite, and widely expected to win Game of the Year and many of the other categories it was nominated for (it ended up winning nine awards). But in industry terms, it is just as significant as Moonlight’s win — maybe more so.

Clair Obscur has been set in stone as the frontrunner of the Game of the Year race for so long — pretty much since its release in April — that it’s easy to forget what a historical upset this victory is. The game was on virtually nobody’s radar at the start of the year, when *Grand Theft Auto 6 *had been expected to sweep all before it, before Rockstar’s anticipated title was delayed into 2026. Clair Obscur is the first game in The Game Awards’ history to cross over from the indie categories (which it also won) to win Game of the Year. It is French developer Sandfall Interactive’s first release. And its publisher, Kepler Interactive, was formed as a partnership between seven tiny indie studios just four years ago. Kepler is every bit the young outsider that A24 was in 2017.

Guillaume Broche accepts the Game of the Year award at The Game Awards 2025.Image: The Game Awards

Yet the steamrolling Sandfall and Kepler engineered this year was more akin to A24’s second Best Picture win with Everything Everywhere All at Once, or Christopher Nolan’s *Oppenheimer *sweep in 2023. The scale of Clair Obscur’s victory is unprecedented, and not fully encapsulated by the factoid that it beat The Last of Us Part 2’s previous record of seven wins by two. Its dominance across the categories was so crushing that no other game scored more than a single win, and Nintendo was the only publisher other than Kepler to take home multiple awards (it won two). Sony, the most successful publisher in Game Awards history, which had led the table with 19 nominations, went home empty-handed — unless you count the Best Adaptation win for season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us. So did superstar director Hideo Kojima, whose Death Stranding 2 had seven nominations.

There’s really no precedent for Clair Obscur’s win. The closest comparison is probably Baldur’s Gate 3, a fan-favorite role-playing game that snowballed to a Game of the Year win that nobody would have predicted at the start of 2023. Baldur’s Gate 3 is technically self-published by independent developer Larian Studios, but was made with the support of Dungeons & Dragons licence holder Hasbro, and wasn’t nominated in the indie categories. It’s also a franchise sequel from a very established, if not exactly mainstream, studio.

Clair Obscur achieved a kind of dominance at the Game Awards — and in the general conversation around the year’s best games — that was previously only within reach of the likes of Naughty Dog or Rockstar Games. For a game with its unheralded pedigree to reach such heights is incredible, and very encouraging for the health of the game industry. It’s also notable that, to the extent that Clair Obscur had any competition at all, it came just as much from a pair of acclaimed indie games, Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong, as it did from Sony and Nintendo’s titles.

The indie takevoer of 2025’s Game of the Year nominees — which included Hollow Knight: Silksong — might be a one-off.Image: Team Cherry

So does Clair Obscur’s sweep herald a new era, as Moonlight did for the Oscars? Will we see a different kind of Game of the Year winner from this point on? Maybe. But maybe not.

Without taking anything away from Sandfall and Kepler’s amazing achievement, a full understanding of the context of Clair Obscur’s wins changes the picture somewhat. 2025 happened to see relatively few major game releases, with publishers steering clear of what they expected to be GTA 6’s release date, or struggling with the ever-lengthening production schedules on blockbuster AAA games. That left an opening for something else to break through.

The confluence of indie contenders is also something of a fluke. This year, half of the six GOTY nominees were also nominated in the Best Independent Game category; in previous years, no more than a single game crossed over. But Hades 2 and Silksong were both hotly anticipated sequels to critical and popular darlings that came out within weeks of each other, a once-in-a-generation event in the indie world. If you look beyond these two games and Clair Obscur, you’ll see that they are the exceptions that prove the rule. The Game Awards’ large, international jury is actually nominating fewer indie games in fewer categories than it was a decade ago.

Clair Obscur offers an experience that’s not far removed from much bigger productions.Image: Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive

Clair Obscur, as a game, is a much more traditional winner than its outsider status might imply. It’s true that there’s a strong specificity to its melding of culturally French references and classic, turn-based Japanese role-playing games, which is part of its appeal. But it’s also a sizable adventure game with high production values, an elaborate fantasy setting, a sweeping story, and cinematic presentation and performances — exactly the kind of easily marketable title that The Game Awards jury tends to prefer. It’s a great game, but it’s far from being a stylistic new frontier for the medium.

What Clair Obscur’s emphatic GOTY win does prove, however, is that it’s now possible for a smaller team, with fewer resources and backing from outside the industry mainstream, to make a game that competes with the major publishers on scope and quality, and connects with players on a massive scale. It’s possible for a publisher like Kepler, and a debut developer like Sandfall, to launch a hostile takeover of gaming’s middle ground and give fans what they want at a lower cost, both to the companies making the game and the players paying for it.

This could be a crucial inflection point for an industry that’s staggering under the weight of the escalating, near-unsustainable costs of the biggest mega-games. Next year will likely see the Game of the Year award go to just such a game, GTA 6. But that’s only if it isn’t delayed again, which, given the Herculean undertaking of its making, is more than possible. If it is, maybe there’ll be another Clair Obscur, another Sandfall, another Kepler, ready to step into its place.