PS.Blog Game of the Year 2023: The Winners

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: 

Welcome to 2024, everyone! With our Game of the Year coverage just about wrapped up, we've put together this handy article in which we're going to recap all of 2023's winners. Indeed, it's time to put that last 12 months behind us and look ahead to what should be another exciting year for PlayStation fans.

Just a couple of days after winning the Game of the Year and Best Story-Rich Game prizes at the Steam Awards 2023, Baldur's Gate 3 is once again preparing to clean up the house at the upcoming 13th Annual New York Game Awards. The New York Videogame Critics Circle (NYVGCC) has just announced the full list of nominees during a live stream event and Larian's outstanding cRPG has received six nominations in the Game of the Year, Best Writing, Best World, Best Music, and Best Acting (twice, for Amelia Tyler as the narrator of Baldur's Gate 3 and Neil Newbon as the High Elf Vampire Rogue companion character Astarion) categories.

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

Oh, hey! Been a minute, hasn't it? Well, a year. It's been a year. Tell you what, though, it sure does feel shorter than that. 2023 has been a whirlwind, full of huge games and even bigger news from January right through to, well, just the other day.

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.

2023 has been another great year for games as a whole with some exceptional experiences that have been a pure joy to play, but as always there’s been some jarring disappointments that hit hard, and we’ve seen the impact of slowing economies around the world on executives making business decisions.

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.

The PC Master Race has been a meme for a good 15 years now, but it’s truer than ever in 2023. A top tier gaming PC might be horrendously expensive when stacked up against a PS5 or Xbox Series X|S, but these days it gives you the best of all worlds. Almost.

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.