Shroud has called on his fans to vote for Arc Raiders as Game of the Year 2025 over Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, calling multiplayer gamers “the minority.”
Canadian Michael ‘Shroud’ Grzesiek, who specializes in competitive multiplayer first-person shooters, is a former professional Counter-Strike player who has built an enormous online audience. With 6.8 million subscribers on YouTube and 11.3 million followers on Twitch, his call to action has significant weight behind it.
Shroud has thrown himself into Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders ever since its explosive launch, and in a recent Twitch stream mobilized his community to vote for the game when it comes to The Game Awards 2025.
“We gotta make sure that this game wins game of the year, by the way,” he said. “Do not let that Expedition game win game of the year. Do not let it. Absolutely do not. We all have to band together to make this game win. Us multiplayer gamers are the minority, okay. We are the minority being multiplayer gamers, but I believe we can win. I believe. You just need to tell everybody. I’ve never voted for anything ever, but I think I’m going to vote this year for this game.”
With the end of 2025 in sight, Sandfall's single-player role-playing game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has emerged as a frontrunner for Game of the Year, but Arc Raiders is being touted by some as a strong contender. Other candidates include Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Blue Prince, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, among others.
Does Shroud’s comment about multiplayer gamers being in the “minority” ring true? Research from last year indicated that most gamers prefer single-player games, but there's a significant difference in preference depending on the age bracket. Midia Research found that under 25s preferred multiplayer to single-player, with younger generations emphasising social play. But as you get older and it becomes harder to arrange time to play with friends, this preference shifts towards single-player.
“Younger players prefer PVP, which captures a large swathe of consumer attention and engagement and is enjoyed by all generations,” Midia Research’s Rhys Elliott said in the report. “Convincing players — and their friends — to leave for new titles is a huge barrier.
“Live-service games are the homes of many highly engaged players. Getting them (and their friends) to relocate permanently to another live-service game is a big ask.”
When people talk about the most popular video games in the world, multiplayer games tend to dominate. Roblox games that blow up, such as Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot, typically have a strong community element to them despite not being traditional competitive multiplayer. Fortnite is a multiplayer game through and through. Minecraft can be played either way.
The dominant games on Steam, meanwhile, are competitive multiplayer: Counter-Strike, Dota 2, PUBG, Battlefield 6, and Apex Legends are, at the time of this article's publication, the top five most-played games on Valve's platform. And let’s not forget the likes of World of Warcraft and League of Legends, both of which are multiplayer games. There are huge single-player games, of course, but when it comes to sheer popularity, or monthly active users, free-to-play multiplayer games dominate the industry.
In any case, Shroud went on to claim that voting in The Game Awards doesn’t matter. “All the f***ing awards are rigged anyway, who cares?” he said in the same stream. “When have you ever seen an award that’s actually legit?”
Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards uses a combination of votes from the games media and influencers and public fan voting. The voting jury has in the past had more of an influence on the outcome. Keighley has said he’s considered going all in on public voting for The Game Awards, but expressed concerns about “social engineering.” It’s worth noting that The Game Awards has a purely fan-voted category called Players’ Voice. The Game Awards 2025 nominees are expected mid-November.
Photo by Robert Reiners/Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
