Game of the Year 2023 – Best PC Game

At the end of 2023, we saw best movies of the year lists from almost anyone with a Letterboxd account, but one movie lover is a little late to the game in posting their favorites. Video game creator Hideo Kojima, and his picks are a little interesting, to say the least. 

It’s a new year, but we’re still thinking about the amazing games we played last year. This week, we’re highlighting some of your favorite captures from 2023 in Share of the Year: 

As we get into the final hours of the year, it’s time to reveal our overall Game of the Year 2023 winner!

For far too long, Xbox gamers have had to say to themselves “Next year. Next year’s going to be the big one” as they hope for platform defining exclusives. It’s no secret that Microsoft’s expanding collection of game studios have struggled to produce over the last few years, but 2023 was a year that changed that in some ways.

2023 was a huge year for PlayStation 5, with Sony finally able to cut loose and produce consoles without any of the constraints of the last few years. There’s now over 50 million PS5 consoles out in the wild, as they’ve taken a firm grasp of this generation, and then there’s the launch of the PlayStation VR 2 to hopefully rekindle their ambitions for virtual reality.

Valve have put together their "Best Of 2023" lists on Steam. This is different from the Steam Awards, voting for which is ongoing, and instead is built from Steam data like revenue, peak concurrent players, and so on. It's interesting every year as older games or indie obscurities do better than you expect.

2023 was an incredible year for Nintendo Switch fans, with Nintendo having easily the strongest line up of first party games and exclusives from the big three console manufacturers. Sure, a large part of that was thanks to the company trawling through their back catalogue of beloved classics and sprucing them up for their current handheld, but there were also long-awaited sequels, rejuvenated mainstays and more.

Seven years on from the first VR gaming headsets launching, it still feels like we’re finding our way with virtual reality. 2024 could change all of that, with Apple hoping to do Apple things for yet another nascent technology, but 2023 has relaid the foundations for gamers with PSVR 2 and Meta Quest 3 both launching and bringing big improvements.

As big as online gaming has become, 2023 has shown that single player games are absolutely thriving. Whether it’s a sequel that takes what its forebears did and refines or expands the experience further, a game that takes a genre and wrings every ounce of creativity and ingenuity out of it with new ideas, this year has been absolutely fantastic for gamers that like to be left alone in front of the screen.

Multiplayer gaming feels pretty much inescapable these days. Sure, we’ve left the days of “tacked on” multiplayer modes behind us, but now we have so many games that are all about online gaming, live service models, and a constant drip feed of things to lure you back in to play.

I think almost every gamer would agree that how a game feels to play is absolutely the most important factor in whether it’s fun or not. Given how many fan-created ‘demakes’ there are of contemporary blockbusters, the proliferation of pixel art (which while it can be pretty is hardly pushing graphical limits), and hilariously shonky nonsense of a game like Vampire Survivors, it’s pretty clear that gameplay is king.

Music is an increasingly important part of modern video games, able to elevate an experience to new heights, adding real emotion to scenes and engaging the player on a more subconscious level. What’s particularly delightful is when it goes beyond merely being an added element alongside the action that takes place on screen, but rather an integral part of the game, right down to its very conception. Of course, just being good music that you can happily listen to outside of a game-playing context helps as well…