The Game Awards website frustrates with crashes and errors even after resolving Cloudflare outage

It’s doubtful that The Game Awards 2025 website will win any accolades for usability. Reports of slow-loading pages and, in the worst cases, crashing browsers and PCs, began soon after the nominees were announced. The massive Cloudflare outage further delayed voting, but even now, the process is often painful.

Reddit is full of unhappy gamers anxious to show support for their preferred nominees. The outage that took down many services on November 18th can take some of the blame. Still, fans now attribute most of the issues to poor website design.

Before voting for Game of the Year 2025 and other selections, gamers must sign in. That sequence requires linking a Google or social media account; otherwise, voters are out of luck. Then, instead of a single list, each of the 29 categories loads one at a time. When encountering recurring errors, it’s tempting to give up before the undertaking is complete.

Why The Game Awards website is floundering

One likely explanation is that the website is rate-limiting visitors. If a server can’t handle heavy traffic, it may block users from loading pages. Also featuring new game reveals, The Game Awards has gradually become more of a must-see event. During the 2024 broadcast, viewership peaked at 154 million global livestreams. Even though fan voting accounts for only 10% of the total vote, interest levels are extremely high.

The Game Awards 2025 doesn’t take place until December 11th, so its organizers have time to address these problems. Once gamers can actually vote, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 supporters will find the RPG has a record 12 nominations. As usual, the big prize is for Game of the Year. Expedition 33 will face off with Death Stranding 2, Donkey Kong Bananza, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.