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Oli Welsh has been covering the business and culture of video games for two decades. He started out writing for Edge and other publications (specializing in MMOs and Blizzard, as cover for his World of Warcraft playtime) before joining Eurogamer, where he worked for 14 years as reviews editor, deputy editor, and editor-in-chief; Eurogamer won many Games Media Awards during his tenure. At Polygon, he writes about film and TV as well as games, and provides news, analysis, and criticism on the entertainment we love and the industries that make it, all from his home in London. He loves role-playing, racing, puzzles, tactics, exploration, storytelling, Nintendo, mysteries, spies, fantasy, reality, cars, and classic cinema. He wanted to be a movie critic when he grew up, and now he’s definitely grown up, and occasionally is one. He considers this a win.
With a dwindling presence on the jury, American games may start to struggle for recognition
It's been a long time since the U.S. held complete sway over voting in The Game Awards. In 2024 and 2025, American outlets took up just 24 seats on an international jury of more than 130. Since the awards began in 2014, there's been a consistent trend of internationalization as the jury has expanded. Even so, the U.S. has consistently had by far the biggest presence of any single country on the jury — at least 10 more votes than any other nation. But that era is over.
This week, as well as confirming details such as the eligibility cutoff date (yes, as predicted, Grand Theft Auto 6 sneaks in just under the wire), The Game Awards has revealed the composition of the 2026 jury. And the biggest change is the dramatically reduced presence of U.S. media.
There are now just 17 American outlets on the jury, a big drop compared to previous years. At the same time, the U.K. — always the second-biggest power in Game Awards voting — has increased its votes from 14 to 17, drawing level with the U.S. for the first time.
At first, this seems like a symbolic shift, rather than one that will have a meaningful impact on the nominations and winners at the awards. After all, the gaming cultures of the U.S. and U.K. are pretty similar, give or take a FIFA or a Madden. But if you zoom in on the changes to the American voting body, and zoom out to consider changes elsewhere in the jury, it starts to look more significant.
The other story this year is the emergence of a third power in Game Awards voting: Brazil, which has increased its footprint by four outlets and now commands 14 votes, just a whisker behind the British and Americans. This is part of a continuing surge in jury members from Latin American countries, which now make up around 21% of the jury.
Meanwhile, the Anglophone voting bloc of the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia is on the wane; the influence of East and Southeast Asia has dropped slightly (China has just three votes); and mainland Europe has consolidated the big increase in jury membership it made last year, now closely rivaling the English-language media by 27% to 28% of the jury, respectively.
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Why did the number of American outlets on the jury drop so sharply? The story here is a mass exodus of mainstream, lifestyle, and tech media. Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Inverse, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Wirecutter, and Wired have all left the jury. It's a very pronounced trend, although I couldn't tell you what's behind it. Perhaps it's a deliberate choice by The Game Awards; perhaps, in the current difficult media climate, these publications have lost their gaming writers.
Last year, I wrote about how an increasingly internationally diverse jury didn't necessarily mean a more diverse group of nominated games. In particular, representation for indie games has shrunk across the categories, likely a side-effect of the fact smaller studios can't often afford to have their games localized into many languages. As the jury has grown, its taste has shrunk, focusing on the kind of games that can travel easily all over the world.
I stand by this argument, but I'd like to note one caveat. There's one way, tallying perfectly with the changes in the jury, in which the games represented at The Game Awards are much more diverse than they used to be: country of origin.
At the Spike Video Game Awards, TGA's predecessor, the Game of the Year winner was far more likely to be an American game than not. Between 2014 and 2020, American games won GOTY at The Game Awards four times out of seven. But since then, there have been no American wins, with the GOTY award going to Sweden, Belgium, France, and Japan (twice). Glossy action-adventures have fallen away (in terms of GOTY wins, if not nominations), with the international jury seeming to prefer RPGs and family games like It Takes Two and Astro Bot.
Is the hegemony of the all-American AAA blockbuster in the GOTY race really over? Well, we'll see. You can't get more glossy than this year's overwhelming favorite, Grand Theft Auto 6. Rockstar Games is headquartered in New York. The game's subject is America. A good proportion of the thousands of people who have worked on it are American, in the San Diego and Los Angeles studios. The lead development studio for Grand Theft Auto games remains, as always, Rockstar North, in Edinburgh, Scotland — but at this point, maybe that's a technicality. Time for one last hurrah, then. But I await the first Brazilian GOTY winner with interest.