The Game Awards 2025 crowned an audacious French debut as Game of the Year, but the evening’s real triumph belonged to queer lives rendered so casually—a girlfriend thanked, fluid desires in pixels—that they barely registered as remarkable. When representation stops shouting and starts murmuring, has it arrived, or merely learned to hide in plain sight?
Expedition 33: Clair Obscur explore a world of wonders inspired by Belle Époque France and battles unique enemies in this turn-based RPG with real-time mechanics.You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
We are grateful!
Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
On a damp December evening in Los Angeles, the Peacock Theatre once again became the unlikely capital of the global games industry. The Game Awards 2025 unfolded as they always do: part coronation, part trade fair, part fever dream. Celebrities drifted on and off stage, orchestral swells accompanied trailers engineered for maximum dopamine release, and somewhere above the stalls, bodies were suspended from the ceiling to advertise a forthcoming role-playing epic. Yet beneath the spectacle, something quieter but more consequential was taking place. This was a year in which games that foreground intimacy, difference, and marginal lives did not merely attend the party; they quietly won it.
The night belonged, unmistakably, to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Developed by the small French studio Sandfall Interactive on a budget that would barely cover the catering of a blockbuster sequel, the game arrived with twelve nominations and departed with nine awards, including Game of the Year. Its triumph was framed, understandably, as a victory for narrative ambition and painterly design. But it was also, less remarked upon, a reminder that the most interesting games now tend to emerge from the margins rather than the centre: from studios willing to explore grief, intimacy, and moral ambiguity without the nervous hedging that often afflicts the largest publishers.
If queer representation was not the headline of the evening, it was nonetheless woven into its fabric. The Game Awards, as an institution, remains cautious on this front. There is no category that explicitly acknowledges LGBTQ+ storytelling, no rhetorical commitment comparable to “Games for Impact”, which this year went to South of Midnight, a lyrical Southern Gothic tale steeped in folklore and historical trauma. Queerness, when it appears on this stage, tends to do so obliquely, in performances, character design, and passing moments of candour rather than in official proclamations.
One such moment came when Jennifer English, who won Best Performance for her role in Clair Obscur, thanked her “beautiful girlfriend” during her acceptance speech. It was a brief remark, unadorned and unstrategic, and precisely for that reason it landed with force. In an industry where representation is often discussed in the abstract—as a market trend or a risk calculation—the offhand visibility of a queer life, spoken plainly into a global broadcast, carried more weight than a dozen panel discussions.
Elsewhere in the winners’ circle, Hades II claimed Best Action Game, continuing Supergiant’s tradition of combining kinetic combat with a world populated by fluid desires and unembarrassed bisexuality. Hollow Knight: Silksong, which took Best Action/Adventure, remains famously opaque about identity, but its fandom has long embraced the game’s ambiguity as a space for queer projection. Even Arc Raiders, winner of Best Multiplayer, reflects a broader shift in character design away from rigid archetypes towards bodies and voices that feel less prescribed, more lived-in.
Yet it would be disingenuous to suggest that The Game Awards have become a vanguard of queer visibility. Compared with the Gayming Awards—which earlier this year honoured Dragon Age: The Veilguard for its explicitly queer characters and performances—the December ceremony still feels like a cautious relative, keen not to upset the seating plan. Queer excellence is present, but it is rarely named as such. The celebration is implicit, never declarative.
This tension mirrors a larger contradiction within the contemporary games industry. On one hand, queer narratives have never been more commercially or critically successful. Role-playing games, in particular, have embraced non-binary protagonists, same-sex romance, and complex questions of identity as central mechanics rather than optional flavour. On the other hand, the industry’s most visible rituals remain structured around a notion of universality that treats queerness as a special interest rather than a constitutive part of the medium.
The announcements that punctuated the ceremony reinforced this ambivalence. The reveal of Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, a spiritual successor to a beloved franchise, was greeted with reverent applause, as was the unveiling of two new Tomb Raider projects. These are worlds with long histories of queer fandom and subtext, yet they were presented in a register of nostalgic grandeur that leaves little room for overt reinvention. By contrast, some of the most intriguing moments came from smaller, stranger corners: Coven of the Chicken Foot, with its elderly witch protagonist, and Ontos, a lunar sci-fi mystery steeped in existential unease. These games did not announce queerness, but they gestured towards forms of life that resist neat categorisation.
Perhaps that is where the medium now finds itself. Queer representation in games no longer needs to shout; it can afford to murmur, to insinuate itself into mechanics and moods rather than slogans. The danger, of course, is that silence can too easily be mistaken for absence. Visibility still matters, especially on stages as influential as this one.
The Game Awards 2025 will be remembered, rightly, as the night an audacious French debut outshone industry behemoths. But it should also be recalled as a moment when the industry’s centre of gravity shifted a little further away from spectacle and towards substance. Queer lives were not the evening’s official theme, yet they were present in its gestures, its performances, and its undercurrents. The task ahead is not merely to include them, but to recognise them openly—not as a footnote to excellence, but as one of its defining forms.
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