Remedy Entertainment has a problem most studios would love to have: The Game Awards jury keeps falling for its games, even when critics don’t.
Look at the record. In 2019, the first Control landed eight nominations, Game of the Year among them, on the back of fairly mild critical praise. It walked away with Best Art Direction. Four years later, Alan Wake 2 also picked up eight nominations and turned three of them into wins, including the big ones: Game Direction and Narrative.
So when Control Resonant showed up on the 2026 calendar, it looked like an easy bet for the Game of the Year conversation. That’s been our working assumption since January.
Built for the Game Awards
Remedy makes exactly the kind of game this show likes to reward. Slick, great-looking, blockbuster action-adventures with real artistic ambition behind them. And because the studio does it outside the big publisher machine, the work carries extra credibility.
The one thing that complicates that story this year is the game itself.
It isn’t bad. Most reviews have been warm, and it’s scored better with critics than the first Control did, a game that has since built a cult following. But there are some loud dissenting voices. Even the friendlier reviews carry a note of unease about the series drifting toward the more mainstream territory of open-world action-RPGs.
Safer, softer, and up against Bond
Here’s our honest read. Resonant has some mechanical weak spots, and it feels safer and more watered down than the first Control. Next to Alan Wake 2, which broke its own form on purpose, the gap is even wider.
On paper, its genre category has stronger contenders, 007 First Light among them. It has zero chance of seriously spoiling the party for Grand Theft Auto 6. We wouldn’t even call it a lock for a nomination (though it still belongs on any short list of front-runners).
But Resonant has something the spec sheet doesn’t capture. People like Remedy.
Everybody loves an underdog
The Finnish studio has a reputation for being talented and cool. Creative director Sam Lake doesn’t hurt either; he’s press-friendly, loves giving interviews and happily hangs out with journalists. More than any of that, Remedy is seen as an underdog. Paradoxically, maybe more so than plenty of far smaller indie teams.
A specific story has taken hold: Remedy is in serious financial trouble and needs Control Resonant to hit or its future is at risk. That idea has spread so far that the main game piracy subreddit is full of earnest posts telling people to buy the game to support the studio. Pirates. Pleading with each other to pay full price.
The money story doesn’t quite add up
Some of that is true. Remedy isn’t a cash machine, and it took a hit from the failure of last year’s FBC: Firebreak, a misguided multiplayer shooter spun off from Control. But the studio’s most recent financial report showed modest profits and didn’t spell out any immediate doom.
If anything is going to move the needle on Remedy’s finances, our bet is the in-development remake of the first two Max Payne games, made in collaboration with Rockstar Games. That seems likelier to shape the studio’s future than Control Resonant does.
None of that has dented the legend. The version people tell is of a lone survivor gambling everything to make original, artistically daring big-budget games on its own terms. And the sheer scale of those games somehow makes the struggle look more heroic than that of a tiny studio like Yacht Club Games, which genuinely did risk financial ruin to make Mina the Hollower. Remedy’s games are the safer commercial prospects at the end of the day, but that isn’t how the story feels.
Where the votes could tip
It’s easy to root for Remedy. It’s easy to want the studio to win. We’d guess that feeling reaches the Game Awards jury just as much as it reaches the Reddit pirates, and it could swing a few votes Control Resonant’s way.
If Resonant hears its name read out in the Game of the Year category this December, don’t give all the credit to the game. Some of it goes to a bunch of pirates asking each other to open their wallets.
