Gamescom 2026 Award: All 19 Categories and How Voting Works

Gamescom 2026 runs August 26 to 30 in Cologne, and the gamescom award is the event's official prize for the best games, trailers, and booths on the show floor. The Foundation for Digital Games Culture (Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur) organizes the award every year. It selects highlights across 19 categories in three groups: Arts, Platform, and Global. Want to know what each category means? Who picks the winners? How fans can vote? This guide covers it all.

1. What Is the Gamescom Award?

The gamescom award is the annual prize given to standout games, exhibitors, trailers, and announcements presented at gamescom. It has been running for over a decade and has grown alongside the event itself. Gamescom 2025 drew more than 350,000 visitors from 128 countries, and the 2026 edition is already sold out for the first time in the event's history.

The Foundation for Digital Games Culture, a German nonprofit, runs the award process. Game producers submit their titles for consideration, a jury of industry professionals nominates the best entries, and then a combined vote of the jury and the community determines the winners in most categories.

The award covers three areas of excellence. The creative quality of games (Arts). The best titles on each gaming platform (Platform). The best exhibitor presence at the event (Global). Each group has its own rules for how winners are chosen.

2. Arts Group: 7 Categories for Creative Excellence

The Arts group recognizes games for their creative and artistic achievements. Game producers can submit their titles for one or more of these categories. The jury nominates the finalists, and winners are decided through a joint vote of the jury and the community.

The Arts group is where the gamescom award gets closest to a traditional game-of-the-year style recognition. These categories judge the games themselves rather than the platform they run on or the booth they're presented in. In 2025, titles like Resident Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert, and Donkey Kong Bananza appeared across multiple Arts nominations, showing how a single game can compete in several creative categories at once.

3. Platform Group: 5 Categories for Best Game by Platform

The Platform group splits the best games at gamescom by the hardware they run on. The process is the same as the Arts group: the jury nominates finalists, and then the jury and community vote together to pick the winners.

Note the gamescom best Nintendo Switch 2 game category. The 2026 award cycle is the first to include Switch 2 as a dedicated platform, reflecting the console's launch year. The gamescom best mobile game category covers both iOS and Android, making it the one award where mobile game developers compete head-to-head regardless of operating system.

In 2025, the gamescom best mobile game nominees included Genshin Impact, Arknights: Endfield, and Love and Deepspace. The range spanned from open-world RPGs to otome titles competing on the same stage. The gamescom best PC game category has historically drawn heavy hitters like Dune: Awakening and Crimson Desert. The gamescom best Xbox game and gamescom best Sony PlayStation game categories round out the platform coverage. Games on every major console and PC get their own shot at recognition.

4. Global Group: 7 Categories for Exhibitor Excellence

The Global group shifts the focus from games to the exhibitors at gamescom 2026. These categories honor the companies that bring the best trailers, announcements, booth presentations, and overall presence to the event. Some Global awards are jury-only. Some are community-driven. The HEART OF GAMING award has its own special selection process.

The Global group is where the gamescom award distinguishes itself from other game industry awards. No other major award gives a prize for booth presentation or merchandise design. The Best Trailer / Announcement category specifically covers content shown during Opening Night Live, the Geoff Keighley-hosted show that kicks off gamescom on August 25, 2026.

The HEART OF GAMING award is the most unique of the 19 categories. It can go to anything that defines the spirit of that year's gamescom. That means it isn't limited to games. It could recognize a person, a company, a concept, or even a cultural moment from the event. The jury alone decides this one.

5. How Gamescom Award Voting Works

The gamescom award uses a two-stage process for the Arts and Platform groups. First, the jury nominates the finalists from all submissions. Then, the jury and the community vote together to determine the winners.

Who is on the jury? The jury is independent and internationally composed. According to the official gamescom award page, it includes representatives of German and international media, social media companies, industry professionals, gaming community representatives, testers from the German Entertainment Software Self-Regulation Body (USK), and journalists.

How does community voting work? Fans and visitors of gamescom can vote both on-site and remotely. In 2025, community voting was open for a two-day window during the event. The 2026 voting schedule will be announced alongside the nominees on August 24.

For the Global group, the voting splits by category. Best Lineup, Best Booth (Jury Award), Best Business Booth, Best Merch, and HEART OF GAMING are jury-only decisions. Best Booth (Consumer Award) and Best Trailer / Announcement are community-driven. This split makes sense. The consumer booth award should reflect what visitors actually experienced. The trailer award captures what got fans excited during the Opening Night Live broadcast.

6. Gamescom 2026 Award Timeline

The award follows a structured calendar that maps onto the event preparation cycle.

The nominees announcement on August 24 is a press release event. The gamescom award page will publish the full list of nominated games, exhibitors, and trailers at that time. If you want to follow the awards, that's the date to watch.

The award presentation happens during the event itself. In 2025, the winners were announced on the main stage in Hall 7 and streamed live globally. Expect the same in 2026.

7. How to Participate in Gamescom 2026 Award Voting

If you want to have a say in who wins, you have two options.

Vote on-site. If you're attending gamescom 2026 in Cologne, you can cast your vote during the event. The 2025 voting window was open for two days during the show, and the 2026 schedule will follow a similar pattern.

Vote remotely. The gamescom award allows remote community voting, which means you don't need to be in Cologne to participate. Details about the voting platform will be published on the gamescom award page when the nominees are announced on August 24.

Either way, your vote only counts where community participation is part of the decision. That means all seven Arts categories, all five Platform categories, the Best Booth (Consumer Award), and the Best Trailer / Announcement. The other five Global categories are jury-only.

8. Gamescom Award Submission and Pricing

Game producers who want their titles considered for the award need to submit an application and pay a fee. The submission deadline for gamescom 2026 was July 24, 2026.

The pricing structure, as listed on the official gamescom award page, works on a per-category basis:

Exhibitors in the gamescom indie area receive a 50 percent discount on submission fees. This pricing model rewards developers who submit across multiple categories. The per-category cost drops sharply after the first three.

Conclusion

The gamescom award 2026 covers 19 categories across Arts, Platform, and Global groups. Games, exhibitors, and trailers all get a chance to earn recognition at the world's largest gaming event. The jury nominates the finalists, the community gets to vote in 14 of the 19 categories, and the HEART OF GAMING award remains the event's most unpredictable prize. Nominees will be announced on August 24, 2026, and if you want to participate in the community vote, keep an eye on the official gamescom award page for the voting platform details. Whether you're rooting for the best mobile game or the best trailer from Opening Night Live, the gamescom award is one of the few major industry prizes where fan votes directly shape the outcome.