gamescom Award 2026 Winners: All 19 Categories

Most of what came out of gamescom 2026 is still a promise. The trailers are for games that mostly have not shipped, the release dates are dates, and the demos were demos. The award is the one item on the week's ledger that closed: on Friday, August 28, trophies went out in 19 categories at the gamescom studio stage, and the list is final.

CD PROJEKT RED and SEGA took three each. Capcom and Ubisoft took two each. That is ten of the nineteen to four companies. The other nine went to nine different recipients, several of whom you have probably never heard of, which is the more interesting half of the list.

Here is all of it, plus the parts of the process that explain the shape of the results.

Every winner, all 19 categories

gamescom splits the award into three groups. ARTS and PLATFORM are for games that were submitted, nominated by the jury, and playable in the entertainment area. GLOBAL covers trailers, booths, merch, exhibitor line-ups and the special jury prize.

ARTS group — seven categories

PLATFORM group — five categories

GLOBAL group — seven categories

Yes, Best Booth is awarded twice — once by the jury and once by the community — and in 2026 the two picked different booths. That is not a tie-break gone wrong; it is how the category is written. The jury's version weighs concept, design, creative execution and, per gamescom, sustainability. The community's version weighs size, design, fan appeal and overall impact.

Who actually cleaned up

Ten to four companies, nine spread across nine. Note how the two three-trophy hauls are shaped completely differently. SEGA's three came from three separate products — Alien: Isolation 2, Total War: WARHAMMER 40,000, and then the publisher itself for Best Lineup. CD PROJEKT RED's three are all the same game.

The ARTS and PLATFORM categories only cover games that were submitted and playable in the entertainment area — which means the queue is part of the qualification. Photo: Sergiy Galyonkin via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Witcher 3 won three without entering a game category

This is the genuinely odd result of gamescom 2026, and it is odd in a way the headlines mostly flattened.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the only single title on the 2026 winners list to take three of the nineteen categories — Best Booth (jury), Best Merch, and Best Trailer / Announcement. All three sit in the GLOBAL group. None of them is a game award. Read the nominee list gamescom published on August 24 and The Witcher 3 does not appear in any of the twelve game categories: five nominees each across ARTS and PLATFORM, sixty slots, and it is in none of them.

So the most-decorated entrant at the world's biggest games event won for a stand, a pin, and a video.

It is also worth being precise about what that video was for, because "won Best Trailer" reads like a verdict on a game and it is not. The winning entry was the announcement of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered together with a first look at the Songs of the Past expansion. CD PROJEKT RED's own press release, dated August 25, puts Remastered at September 29, 2026 as a free upgrade for existing owners on qualifying platforms, with a native Switch 2 version and a Battle.net release on the same day through a new partnership with Blizzard Entertainment, and says all owners of The Witcher 3 can now play Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine at no additional cost. Songs of the Past launches in 2027 as a paid expansion.

Which is to say: at the time the community voted this the best announcement at gamescom, nobody outside CD PROJEKT RED had played any of it. That is fine — the category is explicitly for trailers and announcements shown during Opening Night Live. Just do not read a trophy as a review.

Nominations are not trophies

gamescom nominates five games per category, so the twelve game categories account for sixty nomination slots. Counting those slots against the winners list is where the week's actual story lives.

Those counts are ours, tallied off gamescom's published nominee list; gamescom's own nominee release independently states the top three — five for METRO 2039, four each for Alien: Isolation 2 and Denshattack! — and puts SEGA on eight nominations as a publisher, which is what you get adding Alien: Isolation 2's four to Total War's two and STRANGER THAN HEAVEN's two.

Two things fall out of that table.

METRO 2039 led the entire show on nominations and converted one. Five shots — Best Visuals, Most Epic, and all three platform categories it is releasing on — and one trophy. It is the highest nomination count of gamescom 2026 and a 1-for-5 return.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is the only title nominated more than once that won everything it was nominated for. Two nominations, two wins, and Capcom walked out with the pair. Every other multi-nominated game on that list dropped at least one.

And Denshattack! — four nominations, an indie from Undercoders and Fireshine Games that was itself announced at the previous year's Opening Night Live — went home with nothing. Four nominations is the joint second-highest count at the show.

Who decides a gamescom award

The award is organised by the Foundation for Digital Games Culture as part of gamescom, and the process is public, which is more than most show awards manage.

• Submissions ran May 1 to July 24, 2026. Studios enter themselves, by category.
• The jury nominates five favourites per category, on a points system. gamescom describes the jury as internationally composed, including representatives of German and international media and social media companies, industry representatives, gaming community representatives, testers from the German ratings body USK, and journalists.
• Nominees were announced August 24, two days before the halls opened.
• The community vote ran Wednesday, August 26 to Thursday, August 27 at 2:00 p.m. CEST — online via gamescom.global and on-site by QR code. It covered the ARTS and PLATFORM categories plus Best Booth (Consumer Award), Best Merch and Best Trailer / Announcement.
• Winners in ARTS and PLATFORM are decided by a combined vote of jury and audience. In GLOBAL, four categories are jury-only (Best Lineup, Best Booth, Best Business Booth, HEART OF GAMING) and three are community-only.
• The award show ran Friday, August 28, 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. CEST at the gamescom studio stage in Hall 7, produced with IGN. gamescom's winners release went out the same afternoon.

Note where that window sits. gamescom's own opening-hours page marks Wednesday, August 26 a trade visitor and media day, with private visitors admitted from 1:00 p.m. only and only on a Wildcard — so the vote opened on the day most of the public could not get in, and shut at lunchtime on the second of five show days. gamescom publishes no start time for the vote, so its exact length is not on record. If you were planning to vote on a game you had not yet queued for, you had roughly a day to get to it.

Entrance South at Koelnmesse. Best Business Booth is judged inside the business area, which gamescom's hours page shows closed on Saturday and Sunday — so the jury has to walk it, or be scheduled in, across the Wednesday-to-Friday trade days. Photo: Sergiy Galyonkin via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The seven things the jury scores

gamescom publishes the scoresheet. The jury assesses submitted games on gameplay footage against seven fixed criteria, each scored 1 to 10, and the same criteria are used both to nominate and to pick winners.

Read that last row again. "Sales prospects" is a scored criterion, worth up to ten points like the other six. gamescom's own wording asks whether a game is "already hyped".

Our read: that is not a scandal. It is a trade show award, and a trade show award that scores commercial momentum is being honest about what a trade show is for. But it is worth knowing before you weigh this list against a review score, because "expected to sell well" and "good" are different measurements sharing one scoresheet. gamescom does not publish individual scores, so how much that criterion moved any particular result is unknowable from the outside.

It costs money to enter

The other structural fact that never makes the headline: submission is paid.

Exhibitors in the gamescom indie area get 50% off the submission fee.

Do the arithmetic on METRO 2039's five categories and you are at 830 euros for the first three plus 420 for the other two — at least 1,250 euros before you have shipped a build, staffed a demo pod or paid for floor space. That is trivial for Deep Silver and it is not trivial for a two-person studio, which is presumably why the indie discount exists.

None of this is hidden; it is on gamescom's own award page. But it does mean the winners list is drawn from the set of studios that chose to pay, could get a playable build into the entertainment area, and were nominated by a jury scoring sales prospects — not from everything that appeared at the show.

HEART OF GAMING went to Games Done Quick

The special jury award has the widest scope on the sheet. Where the other eighteen categories are each tied to a game, a booth, a product or an exhibitor line-up, gamescom writes this one open to any gamescom highlight: games, expansions, technologies, individuals, institutions, companies, concepts and ideas.

For 2026 it went to Games Done Quick, and the timing is not subtle — GDQ was making its European debut that same weekend as gamescom GDQ, running August 28 to 30 in the Konrad-Adenauer-Saal. gamescom's August 28 release puts GDQ's lifetime charity total at over 50 million dollars — though gamescom's own gamescom GDQ page says more than 60 million dollars since 2010. Those are two figures from the same organiser and it does not reconcile them, so read 50 million as a floor rather than a count. Proceeds from donations and sponsorship at this edition go to Gaming for Democracy, an initiative promoting democratic values and social engagement through gaming culture.

An award for a charity marathon, presented on the opening day of that marathon, at the show hosting it. Circular, sure. It is also the only category on the sheet with no fixed object: the other eighteen each point at a game, a stand, a trailer, a piece of merch or an exhibitor's line-up, and gamescom's wording opens this one to people, institutions and ideas.

A Games Done Quick crowd at SGDQ 2019. GDQ took the 2026 HEART OF GAMING award on the opening day of its first European event. Photo: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

What this award does not tell you

Being straight about the limits, since a results list invites over-reading:

• It is not a review. The jury assesses submissions on gameplay footage and show-floor builds. Winning Best Gameplay at gamescom is a statement about a demo, not about a finished game.
• A trophy is not a release. The one winner we can date from the publisher's own announcement: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered arrives September 29, 2026, a month after the trailer for it won Best Trailer / Announcement. Songs of the Past is a 2027 expansion. Nobody outside CD PROJEKT RED has played either. Check a release date before you treat any name on this list as something you can go and buy.
• No margins are published. gamescom's winners release names winners and nothing else — no vote counts, no jury scores, no runner-up ordering. A one-vote win and a landslide look identical here.
• Absence is not a verdict. Entry is a paid, self-nominated process that closed on July 24, so a game missing from the list may simply never have been submitted.

Playground Games took Best Microsoft Xbox Game for Forza Horizon 6, from a nominee field that also held Gears of War: E-Day and Halo: Campaign Evolved. Photo: Sergiy Galyonkin via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

If you want the show itself rather than its awards: our gamescom 2026 ticket guide covers prices, hours and the wristband rule, and the stream guide has the broadcast schedule that ONL and the award show sat inside. And gamescom has already dated the next one: gamescom 2027 runs 25 to 29 August 2027 in Cologne, with Opening Night Live on 24 August.

Quick Action Checklist

• If you only remember one line: CD PROJEKT RED and SEGA won three gamescom awards each in 2026, Capcom and Ubisoft two each, and Games Done Quick took HEART OF GAMING.
• Do not read the trophies as scores. Seven jury criteria, one of which is "sales prospects", and the whole thing is judged on demos.
• Check nominations, not just wins. METRO 2039 led the show with five nominations and won one; Onimusha: Way of the Sword went two-for-two.
• The two Best Booth winners are both correct. Jury gave it to The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, the community gave it to Arknights: Endfield.
• Diary the one date that matters: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, September 29, 2026, free for existing owners on qualifying platforms.
• Planning next year already? gamescom 2027 is 25 to 29 August, ONL on 24 August. Our Tokyo Game Show 2026 ticket breakdown is the next show up. More convention coverage in the Gaming Events archive and across the Mythras blog.