Yep budget of under 10m for developement and marketing..... 

On this forum we currently have a thread along the lines of "would you be okay with graphics at ps4 levels" or such.... and like 80% voted yeah that's fine/good enough. It goes to show, that graphics are not as important as people think.

Having a strong vision (its old school jrpg with a twist), good gameplay and story, are so much more important.
Having a small unified team of people, that think alike, don't care about HR departments or DEI/Sweetbaby ink consultants ect....
whose sole purpose is just a lazer pinned focus on making a great game, gets good results.

Spending forever making textures, and lighting ingame, and ray-tracing and pathtracing ect.... you can cut a large amount of that BS out, and no one cares. Hell you can spend less on marketing, and as long as those resources are wisely used for game development instead, the game will speak for itself, if its good.

There is so much waste in game development these days.
They should not be spending 200-400m and like 7-8 years on making a game, ontop of like 50-100m on marketing.
 
Its insane,...
Even worse, if they just are another braindead rip off of overwatch/fortnite,.... while ignoreing that like 90% of these fall flat on their face.

Silksong? Bananza? Hades II? MarioKart? Ghost of Yotei?? Death Stranding?? Split Fiction?? And so on.

This year was stacked with heavy hitters! It’s not even comparable to 2022, which saw only a handful of a games win more than a couple of awards. And in spite of the more aggressive competition, ER won 69% of all awards whereas E33 swept >70%.

Also: “The game scored in the low 90’s” ignores the fact that it scored around where GoW’18 and TLoU:Pt1+2 scored. It sits as the 32nd most acclaimed game of all time on OC.

Same relevance as the outlets selected in 2022/2023. There have been 596 total awards given for 2025, compared to 634 from 2022 and 529 in 2023.

I mean, yes, and all almost equally irrelevant, and more farcical as time goes on. One might as well be adding favorite yearly games from YT streamers.

Cant say its undeserved.

well at that point you dispute the measurement granted by the ReserEra Tracker… which, yeah, I can’t disagree with you there. But I still find it yo be a neat statistic nonetheless. E33 is also the second highest user rated game on MetaCritic & HLTB of all time.

TLoU and GoW scored 94-95 originally and beat 97 GTA5 and RDR2.

The only game that scored notably higher than Clair Obscur last year was Hades 2 at 95. But Hades is a 2D indie, everyone and their grandmas knew it had no chance winning most GOTY's, everyone was right.

Clair Obscur is among the lowest scoring games to have won most GOTY's. And yet afaik it didn't beat a single AA/AAA game scoring a point higher. It was in fact the highest scoring game in the category that could win.

Acting like scores don't matter at all is no different from acting GOTY dominance is completely pointless. No AA/AAA competitor last year was on the same level critically as several games releasing in the few years before it. Losers like FF7 Rebirth, Metaphor, not to mention God of War Ragnarok and Tears of the Kingdom scored higher than Clair Obscur's competition inclduing Bananza. And Mario Kart World?... that game is also in a category that can't win most GOTY's. And, unlike Hades, it wasn't particularly well received. Not worth a mention in a GOTY/reception discussion.

Clair Obscur would definitely not have won this if it faced any of the winners I mentioned.

Show me a single year where a 92 scoring game coming close to a 97+. You can't, because the gap too large for something like this to occur. A game can "punch above its weight" if the weight difference is reasonably small. A 92 game isn't beating GTA5 or RDR2 which scored 97, let alone the games that beat them lol.

Comparisons to previous years are just pointless without checking the competitors' scores, genres, etc.

To be fair lots of competition is different from having strong competition. Ragnarok was a very real candidate for GotY in most other years, but take Clair Obscur out of 2025 and the year feels a lot like 2021 with lots of great titles but no one really obvious game that blew people away. I think in that scenario Silksong would have run away with it like It Takes Two did for being a very impressive indie.

Overrated. Really good game, but overrated.

If only this would influence current AAA. I feel like fate is trying to say something here, and not many people are listening lol