Pure Xbox's Game Of The Year 2023: The Results You Didn't See

It's been a week since we published the Pure Xbox Game of the Year results for 2023, and the winner ended up proving pretty controversial as Starfield took the crown over the likes of Baldur's Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2.

In fact, we've even come in for some criticism for it - despite the fact it was all based on votes and we didn't have a say in the decision! The process began on December 15th, and we received over 5,000 votes from Pure Xbox fans in all.

While we've obviously informed you of the top ten, we've left out quite a few statistics that you might be interested in. For example, how many votes did Starfield actually get? How did the likes of Lies of P and Sea of Stars not make the list? And how did the scores compare between registered Pure Xbox members and one-off visitors?

Let's start with that top ten. As you may recall, we asked you to give five points to your Game of the Year, followed by four points for second place, three points for third, and so on. In the table below, you can see the votes and final score for each game, along with its average ranking from 1-5 (1 being a five-point score) for every person that voted for it.

Game Votes Score Avg Rank Per-Voter (from 1-5)
Starfield 628 2,327 2.3
Baldur's Gate 3 347 1,358 2.1
Hi-Fi RUSH 337 1,139 2.6
Alan Wake 2 288 1,014 2.5
Hogwarts Legacy 266 854 2.8
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty 234 723 2.9
Forza Motorsport 234 722 2.9
Diablo IV 225 635 3.2
Resident Evil 4 183 593 2.8
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor 191 543 3.2

If we compare this list between registered Pure Xbox members and those who are either regular lurkers (in which case, please come and join us!) or one-off visitors, the top ten looks pretty similar on the whole.

The differences are that if we were basing this on PX members alone, Hi-Fi RUSH would have finished in second place above Baldur's Gate 3, Dead Space would have climbed all the way up to sixth position, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty would have dropped to ninth, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor would have fallen to 14th.

So, what about the rest? Which games just failed to crack that top ten? Well, Dead Space is the one that only slightly missed out on 11th place when combining all the results together (it got a score of 503 compared to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor's 543), while Lies of P and Sea of Stars followed fairly closely behind.

Here's a look at the results for 11th-25th, with the overall score in brackets:

There we go then! That's the Pure Xbox Game of the Year roundup for 2023 in the books, and as you can see, Starfield was the runaway winner by quite some distance. Many will attribute that to its wide accessibility as a result of Xbox Game Pass, but it also had the second average highest ranking of any game from those who voted for it.

The grand relaunch of Pure Xbox took place back in March of 2020, and since then we've given out four Pure Xbox GOTY awards based on your votes - those were Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Halo Infinite, Elden Ring and Starfield. Between those four, which do you think is the best? Let us know down in the comments below!