Game of the Year 2025: Day 2

December 25, 2025·1 hr 25 min·7 clips

The Giant Bomb crew debates whether a coin-flipping esport called Q-Up counts as 'Best Gambling' in their 2025 Game of the Year awards.

The ad bleeds straight into Christmas noise. Janet Choa opens Day 2 with Jeff Grubb, Sean McDowell, Chuck Towski, Dan Reichert, Jeff Bacalar, Mike Minotti, and Will Crosby along for the ride. Snow gets inspected for a minute. Somehow that turns into salt trucks, Midwest Ham Fest, and the pork knuckles apparently needed to show up correctly. Then Best Gambling shambles in. The room sounds exactly like this show should: crowded, callback-heavy, and barely organized enough to keep the rundown alive. The best stretch is the Z-teamer argument. Punch-Up comes off funny, charismatic, and irritating, sometimes in the same breath, as the panel tries to separate crude locker-room writing from real character appeal. Jacksepticeye's accent gets genuine affection. It still does not rescue Punch-Up from complaints about workplace harassment, hacked computers, and one joke hammered at the same target for too long. Prism gets through without much damage. Malevolent wins people over with the portal and giant sword combo, giving the argument a rare bit of mechanical sense. Golem gets the homie vote. The whiskey-glass gag helps, because this panel will always reward a dumb visual bit if it hits hard enough. Prism, Malevolent, and Golem settle into the final three pretty quickly, with the room split between power fantasy, charm, and weird loyalty. Then the show remembers it has ceremony to do. Sean reads the final Day 2 category, and the 2021 Game of the Year record gets corrected into Metroid Dread supremacy, with Psychonauts 2 and Vampire Survivors still as runners-up. The close is warm, then immediately gets weird again with mistletoe bits, cast roll call, and one last nod to the audience.

As heard by us

A loose, funny awards-table episode where strange categories turn into surprisingly sharp arguments.

Day 2 of Giant Bombcast's Game of the Year 2025 keeps the holiday energy loose without losing the awards shape. Jan and a packed panel move through oddball categories like Best Gambling, Best Z-teamer, Best Multiplayer, and a Game of the Year 2021 revisit, with the conversation…

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Why you'd press play

Holiday chaos turns a Best Gambling debate into loose, fast-moving Game of the Year nonsense.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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