Forza has won its category at The Game Awards for a decade running. Now Polygon is reporting that the streak might actually end this year, with a Star Wars racer lining up as a serious threat.
Losing a trophy sounds minor. It isn’t, and not because of the trophy.
The interesting part is what the fight reveals. A Best Sports/Racing category exists because someone decided racing games and football sims belong in the same drawer. That one organizational choice decides who a racing game competes against, how many people ever see its name on a stage, and what the internet remembers about it a year from now. Awards don’t just reward quality. They manufacture it, at least in the public’s memory.
The category is the real judge
Here’s the structural problem. Forza Horizon 6 collected some of the strongest review scores of 2026, and TheGamer noted that no racing game has ever been nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards. Think about that for a second. A game can sit at the top of the critical tables, and the structure of the show still files it under a niche heading.
ESPN’s rundown of the 2025 results shows the pattern clearly. Mario Kart World took the sports and racing trophy, while the headline awards went elsewhere. Racing is treated as a genre to be honored politely, not a contender for the big prize.
Consider what that does over time. If a genre never reaches the top tier, publishers learn that a racing game’s ceiling is a category win, so budgets and marketing push follow that ceiling. The category shapes the ambition, which then shapes the next year’s nominees, and the loop quietly confirms itself.
Why does this matter to you as a player? Because most of us outsource a chunk of our taste to whatever won last December. A trophy becomes shorthand for “safe to buy.” A missing trophy becomes shorthand for “probably skip.” Neither shortcut is reliable.
The show itself doesn’t hide the tension. Critics have argued for years that it works more like a marketing event than a ceremony. TheGamer’s blunt version is that more than two hours of the broadcast goes to ads and roughly 45 minutes to actual awards. When the format is built around world premieres, the games with the loudest trailers have a structural edge over the games with the best systems.
How to triangulate instead of trusting a stage
So how do you build taste that isn’t held hostage by a broadcast schedule?
The boring answer works best: never lean on one voice. Read one critic who cares about design, one who cares about player experience, and one outlet that has no stake in what’s being promoted that week. Where those three agree, you’ve probably found something real. Where they split, you’ve found a game worth reading about before you spend money.
The same habit applies far outside games. When I want a read on a new piece of hardware, a payment tool, or a software rollout, I don’t take one review as gospel. I cross-check against a few outlets, and I lean toward similar trusted sources for technology analysis that isn’t tied to a launch-day hype cycle. The point isn’t any single site. It’s having a short, deliberate list you return to, so awards season noise doesn’t set your agenda.
One caveat. Triangulating takes effort, and it won’t save you from every bad purchase. I still bought a racing wheel in 2023 on the strength of glowing coverage, and the force feedback was mushy within a month. Even careful readers get burned. The goal is fewer burns, not zero.
Showcase culture rewards the loud
Showcases work on the same logic as the awards. A trailer has about ninety seconds to land, so the games that thrive are the ones that read instantly: big set pieces, a recognizable license, a stinger at the end. A slow-burn systems game can’t compete on that clock.
This is part of why smaller, curated showcases have grown. Josh Bycer’s weekly indie showcase format gives each game room to be judged on play, not on spectacle. The cozy-game boom, driven in part by shows like Wholesome Direct, tells you the audience was starving for a different filter.
The racing example is useful here because racing is a systems-heavy genre. Tire models, handling curves, and how a car communicates grip through a controller are hard to sell in a trailer. They’re easy to feel in an hour of play. A format that can’t show those things will always undersell them.
And Star Wars gets a different advantage entirely. A licensed racer arrives with built-in nostalgia, instantly legible art direction, and a fanbase that votes. None of that says the game is better. It says the game is easier to rally around, which is a different thing and the one that moves ballots.
Gambling involves risk. Please play responsibly and only wager what you can afford to lose. If you feel gambling is becoming a problem, visit BeGambleAware.org or call 1-800-GAMBLER.
What to watch when the nominees drop
When the nominations land, resist the urge to read them as a ranking. Read them as a map of what the organizers, publishers and voters were paying attention to.
A few questions help. Which games got nominated in multiple categories, and are those the ones with the biggest marketing budgets? Which genres are quarantined into their own category instead of competing across the board? And which release from the year shows up nowhere, even though your own friends couldn’t stop talking about it?
That last one matters most. The gap between what a stage celebrates and what people actually kept playing is where your own taste lives. I’d argue the best games list you can make is the one you build from your own hours, then sanity-check against critics you trust.
If Forza does lose, don’t read it as a verdict on the game. Read it as a reminder that the verdict was never the point.
