PS5 owners voted for their own Game of the Year and it’s not Clair Obscur

Despite the widespread praise, it seems the PS5 community don’t think Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the console’s best game.

While Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards show gets all the focus each year, because of all the new game announcements, Sony also holds its own annual awards via the PlayStation Blog.

The key difference is that the winners are decided entirely by the fan community, with this year seeing almost 1.5 million people cast their votes to determine the best PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 games of 2025.

Considering it won Game of the Year at both The Game Awards and the Golden Joysticks, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 should’ve been a shoe-in for Best PS5 Game. But in actual fact, something else claimed the top spot.

The PlayStation Blog writes that it was an extremely tight race, but the community ultimately voted for Ghost Of Yōtei, which served as Sony’s big first party console exclusive for the year.

Ghost Of Yōtei was nominated for several awards at The Game Awards (not Game of the Year, though) but failed to land a single win. In fact, most of its losses were to Clair Obscur, which took Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, Best Art Direction, Best Score & Music, and Best Performance.

The Ghost Of Yōtei fans must’ve really come out in full force to support it for the PlayStation Blog awards, although it was no doubt helped by the fact that it’s the only major Sony-made game of the year.

Developer Sandfall Interactive is hardly going to lose sleep over this, though. Aside from receiving a lot more prestige, it’s also vastly outsold Ghost Of Yōtei. Per Alinea Analytics, a recent boost from its Game Awards victories saw it cross the six million sales mark.

By comparison, Ghost Of Yōtei’s last recorded sales figure was 3.3 million copies in early November.

As a multiformat release it’s not known how much Clair Obscur sold on PlayStation 5 alone, but it’s likely to be in the same ball park as Ghost Of Yōtei.

Elsewhere, Ghost Of Yōtei won in six other categories, including Best Graphical Showcase (which is deserved, it’s a very pretty game) and Best Audio Design.

Clair Obscur was still a fan favourite, though, claiming awards for Best Story, Best Soundtrack, and Best Independent Game.

And yet Studio of the Year went to neither Sandfall nor Sucker Punch but Kojima Productions for its work on Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, which also received several nominations at The Game Awards and won none of them.

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