Hugo Award stats, 2026

Back in April I took a look at the Hugo Award finalists, with an eye to seeing how the votes might divide up. I did this because the 2025 Best Game voting showed an interesting split between "indie" and "big company" voters (in some sense of those very subjective terms).

Well, the 2026 Hugo Awards were announced this weekend, and the results are... boring. No! I don't mean boring; we got a great lineup of new works across SF media, and I was excited to see them. But as statistics, there's not much to say.

(The 2026 Hugo Full Statistics report can be found on the LACon Hugo Award site.)

Best Game

The winner for Best Game was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a game which has already won so many award slates that the developers have run out of champagne and are now toasting with Grape Nehi. If we look at the (still very cool) Sankey diagram:

Best Game 2026 runoff. Click for larger version.

...we learn that the voters were heavily in favor of Clair Obscur from the kick. After each other candidate was eliminated, its partisans leaned towards Clair Obscur. So Clair Obscur won. Indie vs AAA? Narrative vs combat? Sorry, people just liked the game. That is all there is to say.

Okay, Hollow Knight voters had a thing for Hades 2, which is mildly interesting.

I was of course rooting for Blue Prince, which made a respectable second-place showing. (BP has also won a metric ton of awards, so don't take my snarking above too seriously.)

It's worth noting that when Blue Prince was eliminated in the last round, almost half its votes dropped out. That is: a large fraction of the people who listed Blue Prince did not rank Clair Obscur on their ballot at all. This indicates a strong voter split between fans of cryptic puzzlefests and hair-trigger combat mechanics... But you didn't need me to tell you that.

As for me, I still can't parry for crap so Clair Obscur is not going on my wishlist.

Since the report provides it, let me add the list of nominees that didn't make the finalist cut:

• Split Fiction
• Tiny Bookshop
• The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship
• Strange Antiquities
• Type Help
• The Alters
• Blue Planet
• The Séance of Blake Manor
• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Daggerheart

Yay for Type Help and Strange Antiquities! Blake Manor was also worth playing but didn't really work for me. I am sort of interested in The Alters but thinking about survival games makes me tired.

This shall not be the last you hear of Type Help. I expect to be a Hugo voter next year, and I absolutely intend to nominate The Incident at Galley House.

Best Related Work

I also paid attention to Best Related Work, because I am a fan of both Ada Palmer and Elizabeth Sandifer. (I support Sandifer's Patreon.) Here again the fans had a favorite and stuck with it, although the challengers were closer.

Best Related Work 2026 runoff. Click for larger version.

"Last War in Albion" (the Gaiman essay) was a hell of a piece, but it just didn't have a strong constituency.

Back in April I said "I want to read Inventing the Renaissance but I have not yet dug in and done it." Guess what, I still haven't. This time for sure. As soon as I finish the books I picked up at NecronomiCon, and the fourth Heaven's Vault book which has been making sad eyes at me for months...

Nominees that did not make the finalist cut:

• We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories About Political Protest, Resistance, and Hope (Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older)
• Enshittification (Cory Doctorow)
• When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident (Grigory Lukin)
• Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles (Jaroslav Olša, Jr.)
• Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke)
• r/fantasy 2025 Book Bingo (r/fantasy Bingo Team)
• The Outspoken and the Incendiary (Terry Bisson)
• Mark as Read Column (Molly Templeton)
• The Martian Trilogy (John P. Moore, et al)
• Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling (Henry Lien)

(I have not read any of these. Wait, I must have read some of the original "Enshittification" essay, but the nomination went to the book. Anyhow the word "enshittification" immediately outgrew Doctorow and that's the part I now remember.)

In conclusion

Blogging about Hugo statistics is boring. I should read/play/watch more works and blog about them instead. Onward to Montreal in 2027!