By The 44th Golden Joystick Awards run on November 11. GTA 6 comes out on November 19. Those eight days are the whole story: public voting in most categories opens September 25 and closes October 23, and the Ultimate Game of the Year vote runs October 26 to 30. Every ballot is counted and sealed before anyone outside the press has touched the game.
There is a joke buried in that. GTA 6 has taken Most Wanted Game at these same awards two years running, in 2024 and 2025, and Trailer 2 won Best Game Trailer last year — the trailer beat actual shipped games at their own ceremony. Rockstar has been collecting Golden Joysticks for a game you couldn’t play. The one year you can play it, it isn’t on the ballot.
Which is the right call, and I say that as someone counting the days. These awards are fan-voted — 21 million votes across 22 categories last year — and that is precisely the mechanism that would hand Game of the Year to a game nobody has finished. Prizes for anticipation already exist, GTA 6 keeps winning them, and they are a different thing entirely. Let the big one go to something people have actually played through.
So the trophy question moves to the 2027 ceremony, and that one arrives with a full year of Leonida behind it — reviews, speedruns, the arguments about the ending, all of it. The Game Awards keep their own calendar and their own cutoff, and that’s a separate conversation for December. What isn’t moving is November 19: eight days after the ceremony, and that date has held since November 2025.