The winners of the GAM3 Award 2023 have been crowned! The 19 winners were revealed at a live event presented in partnership with Magic Eden on December 14th, marking a well-deserved close to the year and celebration of how far the web3 gaming industry has come.

Following an extremely close competition between the top games in web3 gaming, the GAM3 Awards winners were announced during the 1.5 hours event across livestreaming platforms. Each game, and content creator, managed to top their category to stand out amongst their peers based on their tremendous progress made over the past 12 months.

Here is the full list of winners:

• Game of the Year: Parallel
• Most Anticipated Game: Shrapnel
• Best Graphics: Shrapnel
• Best Action Game: My Pet Hooligan
• Best Mobile Game: Mighty Action Heroes
• Best Adventure Game: Big Time
• Best Casual Game: Pixels
• Best RPG: Big Time
• Best Shooter Game: Deadrop
• Best Strategy Game: Parallel
• Best Card Game: Parallel
• Best Multiplayer Game: Big Time
• Best Esports Game: Deadrop
• Best Content Creator: Sam Steffanina
• Best On-Chain Game: Pirate Nation
• Best Fighting Game: Champions Ascension
• Best Racing / Sports Game: NFL Rivals
• People's Choice Award: Star Atlas
• Games' Choice Award: Wildcard

This year’s GAM3 Awards prize pool for the winning games exceeds $2M+ and ranges from cash grants, tech service credits, marketing support, sponsored tournaments, infrastructure support, cloud gaming functionality, and much more from a wide range of partners including Amazon, Magic Eden, AD Gaming, BNB Chain, Immutable, Ultra, Blockchain Gaming Alliance, Naavik, Aethir, and Sequence among others.

The winners were decided by a combination of jury and public voting. The jury's votes had a 90% influence, while community votes accounted for the remaining 10%. People’s Choice and Best Content Creator are exceptions to the rule as they are 100% community voted.

Initially, 214 nominated games were put in front of 70+ jury members to help produce the preliminary list of nominees. Based on gameplay, mechanics, replayability potential, "fun" factor, accessibility and overall quality - 40 shortlisted games have made it onto the next round which opened up for community voting from November the 22nd till December 7th.

Community voting played a role in deciding the final decisions with over 450K votes from over 50K unique voters. October 26th marked the GAM3 Awards 2023 announcement. Since then, hundreds of web3 games urged their communities to nominate and vote for them across different categories. Thousands of social posts were spread across partners, games, media outlets, content creators, and community members generating over 35M impressions.

Parallel and Big Time both swept 3 awards each (tied for most awards) with the former winning the title of Game of the Year. In addition, both Deadrop and Shrapnel shared 2 awards each with the later crowned “Most Anticipated Game” for the second year in a row. The final list of 12 winning games included 4 games built on Polygon, followed by 2 Ethereum L1 titles and an equal share of 1 title across Immutable, Ronin, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Solana and EOS each.

The GAM3 Awards 2023 ceremony on December 14th saw a peak viewership of 36K+ CCV and an average of 12.2K viewers throughout the entire show across Twitch alone. Overall, over 50K viewers tuned in live across all livestreaming platforms with the event reaching over 250K+ views in the first 24 hours alone. 

Viewers got to witness gameplay premiers and exclusive premier trailers from Star Atlas, Blocklords, Infinite Victory, Wilder World, Thetan Rivals, Apeiron, Xociety, Forgotten Playland’s official reveal, Aether Games’ Saga CGI series teaser, as well as the first ever look at Ultra’s exclusive title, Project Citadel. All of which are a testament to the bright future of web3 gaming as we head into 2024 with the event expected to return next December for its third consecutive edition.