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Millions of votes later, Hollow Knight: Silksong has officially taken home Steam’s Game of the Year award for 2025. It’s the highest-profile prize yet for the excellent Metroidvania Soulslike after it repeatedly lost out to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 at recent events like the Game Awards. The game is finally getting its much-deserved flowers just as Valve’s storefront cracked an all-time concurrent player peak to kick off 2026.
In addition to Clair Obscur, Silksong was also up against Arc Raiders, Dispatch, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for Steam’s GOTY, so winning is no small feat. It’s also been the platform’s best-selling game throughout the holiday season and continues to set new concurrent player records on PC. Over the weekend it cracked 450,000.
Here are the rest of the 2025 Steam Awards winners:
- VR Game of the Year: The Midnight Walk
- Labor of Love: Baldur’s Gate 3
- Best Game on Steam Deck: Hades 2
- Better with Friends: Peak
- Outstanding Visual Style: Silent Hill f
- Most Innovative Gameplay: Arc Raiders
- Best Game You Suck At: Hollow Knight: Silksong
- Best Soundtrack: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- Outstanding Story-Rich Game: Dispatch
- Sit Back and Relax: RV There Yet
Are the Steam Awards, where the winners are determined entirely based on user votes, basically a popularity contest? Yes. Could you have predicted most of these winners ahead of time? Probably! But it’s also neat to see so many great games given their flowers across unique categories in which they are unquestionably very deserving of praise.
The results are certainly more interesting than those at this year’s Game Awards, where Clair Obscur swept and Silksong didn’t even nab the Player’s Voice award. That went to free-to-play gacha action-RPG Wuthering Waves. The Steam Awards are also by far the biggest community-voted prize in gaming. Anyone with an eligible Steam account can participate and the platform recently boasted a new record player peak of 41,746,984. Is it catching up to Roblox any time soon? Doubtful. But it’s good news for everyone trying to actually make and sell games on Valve’s storefront.
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