Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the 2026 GDCA Game of the Year, landing the standout RPG top honors in addition to four other category wins at the latest edition of the developer-voted award show.
Held yearly at GDC Festival of Gaming, the Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA) is a peer-voted competition where both nominees and final winners are decided on by a sizable jury of game developers.
This year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 led the show. In addition to its Game of the Year win, Sandfall Interactive’s debut title landed award wins for Best Debut, Best Visual Art, Best Narrative and Best Audio.
Dogubomb’s Blue Prince was the second most honored game of the night, securing the curious home-building puzzler the Innovation Award as well as honors for Best Design. A full list of award winners can be found below.
Honoring Game Industry Greats
In addition to spotlighting the top games of the year, the GDCAs also highlight individuals that made a positive impact on the game industry and the lives of the people within it.
This year, two such special awards were given away. The Ambassador Award was posthumously awarded to Interplay co-founder and prolific game developer Rebecca Ann Heineman, who passed away late last year. Heineman, a board member of LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD, founded numerous studios throughout her storied career in addition to providing her programming and designing skills to titles like The Bards Tale III: Thief of Fate, Defiance, and Dragon Wars. Her career led her to studios like EA, Ubisoft, Amazon, Microsoft, and Sony, to name just a few.
Don Daglow, the Emmy Award winning game designer responsible for many “firsts” in the game industry, was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Daglow has worked on well over 100 games in his 55-year career such as BASBAL, the first baseball game, Utopia, the first RTS sim game, and Neverwinter Nights, the first non-text based MMORPG.
Winners of the 2026 GDCAs
Best Debut
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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive)
Best Design
Best Technology
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Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (Kojima Productions)
Best Visual Art
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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive)
Innovation Award
Best Narrative
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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive)
Audience Award
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and Roger (TearyHand Studio)
Best Audio
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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive)
Social Impact
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Consume Me (Jenny Jiao Hsia)
Game of the Year
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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive)