The 44th Golden Joystick Awards start at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. GMT / 7 p.m. CET on Wednesday, November 11, 2026. The winners are revealed live from The Troxy in London, the awards’ press release says, and the ceremony streams on YouTube, Twitch, Steam, TikTok and X.
Actor Alix Wilton Regan hosts. She plays Lara Croft in Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, and she says in the press release: “We’re celebrating the greatest games of the past 12 months.” It is also carried by Future Games Show and outlets such as PC Gamer, IGN, WhatCulture Gaming, Ginx TV and eClutch, plus Niconico, Kuaishou and Bilibili. The official artwork points to the awards’ Twitch channel, twitch.tv/goldenjoystickawards, for the stream.
Voting is already over. The awards’ own site lists the deadlines: nominations opened on August 6 and closed on August 28, the shortlist went out and voting opened on September 25, and voting shut on October 23. Ultimate Game of the Year is the headline award, and it has its own voting window because it opens later so players have time to finish the autumn releases. That window ran from October 26 to October 30.
There are 25 categories. Twenty-two are voted for by the global gaming public, and three are not: Streamers’ Choice, Critics’ Choice and Developers’ Choice, which is the new award that invites the people who make video games to celebrate their peers’ work.
Ultimate Game of the Year has 12 nominees: 007 First Light, Big Walk, CONTROL Resonant, Crimson Desert, Dispatch, Forza Horizon 6, Phantom Blade Zero, Pokémon Pokopia, PRAGMATA, Resident Evil Requiem, STAR WARS: Galactic Racer and The Blood of Dawnwalker.
We have covered a good part of that field. Phantom Blade Zero sold four million copies in 72 hours, Crimson Desert got a launch time, 007 First Light is coming to Switch 2, CONTROL Resonant passed a million sales and The Blood of Dawnwalker got a 1.1 patch.
The voting is the point. The Golden Joystick Awards were first held in 1983 and are the world’s longest-running publicly-voted gaming awards, so 22 of the 25 categories come from players instead of a jury. Developers’ Choice is the one genuinely new thing on the card. Timing matters too: 1 p.m. ET is lunch hour on a Wednesday in the US, but late afternoon in London, so viewers in the UK need to plan around it.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
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