Bloodborne and Undertale are easily in my TOP 5 games of all time. Can't decide between them.

... But since Undertale is getting very few votes, I'm giving it some much needed love ^^

Pretty strong year IMO.

The obvious heavy hitter was The Witcher 3. Really good game, but in going open world it lost the attention to detail of TW2, which is, IMO, the better format for telling Witcher stories (and thus I prefer TW2). In addition, being touted by devs as influenced by Gothic, it didn't have as much of the freedoms that Gothics have, so was a slight disappointment in that regard for me as well.

Bloodborne was something I tried, and didn't like that much. I do need to give it a second chance eventually, but I don't care for that setting (as opposed to Souls) and not having shield is also not to my taste.

Fallout 4 was mostly disappointment - Fallout 3 was already Fallout reduced, with NV being glimmer of hope, but FO4 was, although with improved action mechanics, a further step away from original Fallout design.

I don't play a lot of online stuff (apart from some niche things), but both Rocket League and Splatoon were massive hits and are easily contenders for GotY.

Soma was a pleasant surprise for me. I must admit, I didn't care much for Amnesia, although I really love their first game, Penumbra, so was both a bit reluctant and curious about this one. Liked it quite a bit. I guess it's all about setting for me when it comes to horror genre, and this one being placed in an underwater research facility hit the spot.

On the opposite side of what's fun, there was Just Cause 3. I liked the first two so-so, but this one was just pure silly fun with all the destructible physics and parasailing/paragliding.

Kerbal Space Program officially launched that year, but that one I consider as a 2013 release, given the amount of community content it already had prior to offcial release.

Ori and the Blind Forest was a superb 2D Metroidvania with fantastic art style. One of my favourites from that year.

Dying Light came as a complete surprise to me - I remember after watching the first reveal trailer not being very interested in it (although I am a sucker for a good zombie apocalypse and liked both Dead Island and Mirror's Edge), yet when it launched, after watching some gameplay, I decided to give it a go. Oh dear, was I wrong - I really liked that combination of parkour, melee fighting and overall atmosphere of the game. It overstayed it's welcome a bit in the later part of the game, but I still remember it as one of my favourites from that year.

I'm not a big fan of SMB type of platformers, but I got Super Mario Maker for my kid who is a fan, and I spent quite a bit with it fooling around and making levels for him to beat. It reminded me of some of the old games from C64, like Kickstart which was a motorcycle obstacle course game, which had level builder - a lot of time spent in that on when I was a kid.

Another great WiiU game was a great puzzle/exploration adventure called Affordable Space Adventures. I played it coop with kids, all playing different crewmembers with our own tasks and having to coordinate and time things properly to succeed in overcoming obstacles.

A mobile game that surprised me a lot was Lara Croft Go. As a TR fan who got very disappointed with what was happening with the IP since the Reboot, smaller TR games were my last hope that the spirit of old TR is still alive, with this one (in addition to "Lara Croft and the..." series) being quite enjoyable.

CRPGs had quite a year with Pillars of Eternity, Underrail and The Age of Decadence. Pillars was the second large Kickstarter (after Double Fine's adventure) that have shown that there is a market for old school games, and one with the biggest budget out of those three. AoD is probably the most rough around the edges, yet most distinct one in actually being most similar to tabletop RPGs in its options of how to play and where combat is something you actually really don't want to do unless you absolutely have to.

Indie games had a fantastic year as well: Undertale, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Besiege, Sunless Sea, Invisible, Inc.. Two especially stood out for me, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, which was another game that you could play coop, controlling different stations throughout the spaceship you're on, and my favourite game from that year, Westerado: Double Barrelled, open world top-down pixel art shooter set in the Wild West, with a lot of that Spaghetti Western feel to it, which can also be played in coop. Fairly short, but very sweet.

Ultimately, although not my favourite, I have to give my vote to The Witcher 3. It was less that what I wanted and hoped for (both when it comes to as Witcher game and "Gothic influenced" game), but it was and still is a pretty good package overall.

Honestly it was simply the fact that it released on Wii U only that killed it, Wii U didn't sell well at all so most gamers never got the chance to play XCX, VGC estimated XCX sales at 840k copies as of 2018 when they stopped estimating software sales. Nintendo would do well to remaster/remake it for the upcoming Switch 2 as Monolith Soft's first game for the new generation. 

It's not for everyone, it can be multiple peoples favorite game of all time and it has at the moment I'm typing this 21% of the vote.  I played Bloodborne from playstation + for about 45 minutes, died on the first enemy, re spawned died on the first enemy, re-spawned ran around the first enemy died on the next enemy..deleted the game.  Not my type of game, so not the type of game I'm personally going to vote for.  That being said, I think it's great it has such a huge audience of gamers that really enjoy the Souls Type of games.

Yeah, I have the same issue with Souls-likes, as do many others, the only one I tried was Sekiro and I reached a total brick wall of difficulty along multiple paths and just couldn't progress. Souls-likes will always be limited on user voted awards due simply to the genre's fairly strict adherence to high difficulty (with only a few select Souls-likes such as the EA Star Wars Jedi series and the upcoming Black Myth Wukong offering difficulty selection options). It's kind of hard for people to pick something as their GOTY if they can't even come close to finishing it. It's why no Souls-like yet has won the Player's voice award at The Game Awards, not even Elden Ring could pull it off last year, it lost the Player's Voice award to Genshin Impact, a GaaS game. 

If you look at the two leading games for 2015 on this voting you have Bloodborne, a game which was very hard to beat, and then you have Witcher 3, a game which was difficult on it's highest difficulty setting but way easier on it's easiest setting. It's pretty obvious to me that Witcher 3 would have the advantage in any fan voted award, which is why Witcher 3 won 88 Reader's Pick/User Voted awards in 2015 to Bloodborne's 8, 11x more. There is also the fact that Bloodborne was exclusive to a single platform and has never been ported to PC or remastered/remade for PS5, while Witcher 3 released on 3 platforms originally and is now on 6 platforms (PC, PS4, PS5, XB1, XS, Switch).

On paper this might be a good year, but for me personally the first cracks in the dome above the gaming world had started to show. 2014 was decent for WiiU, but by 2015 is was clear where this was headed. The 3DS at this point had also run through most of its fuel and other consoles and PC games were getting more and more complicated and ever longer while also began to feel a bit 'same-y'. This is why I never tried any of the big games in the poll for example, even though I could have liked say The Witcher 3 if I had the motivation. Besides that my bigger personal interests had been increasingly moving away to another hobby outside of gaming for a few years now. Still though, from the poll I played Super Mario Maker and from the 'other' list I played Cities Skylines, Zelda Triforce Heroes and Rise of the Tomb Raider. I've also seen a lot of Fallout 4, because my mother, a big fan of that series played all the way through it on the big living room tv.

To get it out of the way; Zelda Triforce Heroes, is terrible. Absolute evidence that such style just doesn't work for a Zelda game. At all. The best thing about it was keeping the ball up in the multiplayer lobby room. If it wasn't for the preview of "Zelda U" we had already seen at this point, my faith in the Zelda franchise would have plummeted then and there like it had years earlier for some other franchises. Rise of the Tomb Raider was a great follow-up to the first game of this reboot series, I like this trilogy very much, it did what the first game did great and provided more of it. Super Mario Maker was the most logical game that could ever have come to WiiU. I think it should have been a launch title, because it proved the usefulness of the touch screen tablet. It was quite fun to play, and the editor was intuitive. I uploaded quite a bunch of, if I might say so myself, quite decent levels. In the beginning I noticed they would get plenty of plays, but after a while this would get less and less. As the player base seemed to die off, I lost interest because what is the incentive then to keep making levels? I know this is a problem Nintendo could never have avoided, but it impacted my view of the game.

Cities Skylines I was excited for, and it usurped the entirety of the (modern-day) city-building genre. It is indeed a good game, and I ended up playing it quite a lot. However as always I wanted way more, or rather other things from it. The continuing problem with city builders in general is that they are always geared towards building 'American style' cities, probably because creating a game that functions like that is easier to program (even if the developer and publisher of this is Scandinavian). With this I mean, that cities always end up block-based, car-based with big streets and wider avenues, and buildings are individual units with a certain function. But that's not how it works in for example Europe, where cities are old, have grown organically over centuries, have compact city centers mostly only accessible by pedestrians and trams, have an extreme variety of building shapes as they are crammed in every available spot, don't have a dedicated function so there is always mixed use, everything could be anything and are always built wall-to-wall. Now, this game did however introduce a great new way to organically draw roads and other networks, but the buildings would still be static, singular and square. So it was on to mods and custom assets in the hope I could make something 'European'. This however still didn't really satisfy, as it becomes ever more complicated and time-consuming, compromising intuitiveness and well, my computer's CPU. Because of this I began to turn away from this game again without ever creating something to my satisfactory, with the realisation that older games that are simpler by necessity like SimCity 3000 and 4 are actually better in building whatever you want because with those it's easier to let your imagination run free.

Besides these I also played Zelda Majora's Mask 3D, Resident Evil Revelations 2, a bit of Wolfenstein The Old Blood and Prison Architect. Now, Majora's Mask is obviously far and away the best game out of those I played this year, but because it's a remake I won't count it. Still, this particular one among the 3D Zelda remakes and remasters is the weakest, because it makes stuff worse than they were in the original. The bosses are the obvious culprit, piece by piece worse than what they were on N64, but also the save system. While it is convenient you could now save like any other game, it takes away the fact that 'saving' was actually a gameplay element in the original and it as such hurts the immersion. The notebook is also somehow less useful and clear than it was originally. It looks great though, and some add-ons like the fishing hole are welcome. Prison Architect was fun, but limited. Lastly I didn't like Resident Evil Revelations 2, and thought it was way inferior to its excellent predecessor. I was bummed (and puzzled) it didn't come to 3DS, and I decided to get a Vita instead just for that game to at least keep it a handheld experience as that felt like the right thing to do. I was disappointed in Vita as a device itself, but the game didn't look as good as the first game did on 3DS, supposedly 'inferior hardware', either and the levels and story weren't nearly as compelling.

All in all, there's not really any competition this year, as all games besides Majora's Mask, which is disqualified, Tomb Raider and Cities Skylines were either short-lived, mediocre or worse. Tomb Raider is a sequel however, and that doesn't really have much impact if it's also a lot like its predecessor. Impact Cities Skylines at least did have. My vote is Other, with Cities Skylines.

This is why I enjoyed Cities in Motion, being able to play in European city scenarios, adding/fixing public transportation. It's been 10 years now since Cities in Motion 2, would love a new version. However Collossal Order is still working on trying to fix the rather disastrous launch of Cities Skylines 2 :/

Actually most of the time I spend with CoM was recreating the town I live in, now a snapshot in 'history' before the big expansion gained momentum. Then solving our traffic problems with public transport solutions (we don't even have regular bus service here, only on call)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=192246458

Sandbox building is fine with me, more variety would be nice though.

I have 2022 hours in Rocket League, but I hate it.

The game is great, the players are not. What got me out of the game were the people whining about every single mistake or otherwise subpar performance... in casual mode. It was a great game for relaxing, until it wasn't anymore, because of the players. Muting and reporting help, but not very much, since it was very much a reoccurring thing. I think some improvements have been made since, but I haven't really had the urge to play the game anymore. Not sure what your issue with the game is, but that's mine.