Most studios would be glad to have Remedy Entertainment’s problem: its games keep winning over The Game Awards jury, even when critics are less enthusiastic.
The track record makes the case. Back in 2019, the original Control earned eight nominations, including Game of the Year, even though critics had been only fairly mildly positive about it. It went home with Best Art Direction. Four years on, Alan Wake 2 also received eight nominations and converted three of them into wins, among them the headline awards for Game Direction and Narrative.
That is why Control Resonant, once it appeared on the 2026 release calendar, looked like a safe pick for the Game of the Year discussion. We have been working on that assumption since January.
Built for the Game Awards
The show tends to reward the kind of game Remedy builds: polished, visually striking blockbuster action-adventures with genuine artistic ambition. The studio also makes them outside the big-publisher machine, which lends the work extra credibility.
This year, the complication is the game itself.
Resonant is not a bad game. Reviews have mostly been warm, and critics have scored it higher than the first Control, which has gone on to earn a cult following since release. Still, some critics have been loudly negative. Even the kinder reviews sound uneasy about the series edging toward the more mainstream ground of open-world action-RPGs.
Safer, softer, and up against Bond
Our honest view is that Resonant has some weak spots in its mechanics, and it comes across as safer and more diluted than the first Control. The gap looks wider still next to Alan Wake 2, which deliberately broke its own form.
On paper, stronger contenders fill its genre category, including 007 First Light. It has no real chance of upsetting Grand Theft Auto 6. We would not even call a nomination guaranteed, though it still deserves a spot on any short list of front-runners.
Resonant does have an advantage that no spec sheet shows, though: people like Remedy.
Everybody loves an underdog
The Finnish studio is known for being both talented and cool. Creative director Sam Lake helps too. He is easy to deal with for the press, enjoys interviews and is happy to spend time with journalists. Above all, Remedy is seen as an underdog. Oddly, that perception may be stronger for Remedy than for many much smaller indie teams.
One particular story has caught on: Remedy is in deep financial trouble, and if Control Resonant does not succeed, the studio’s future is in danger. The idea has spread so widely that the main game piracy subreddit is full of sincere posts urging people to buy the game to support the studio. Pirates are begging one another to pay full price.
The money story doesn’t quite add up
Parts of that story are true. Remedy does not print money, and it was hurt when last year’s FBC: Firebreak flopped. That game was a misjudged multiplayer shooter spun off from Control. Even so, the studio’s latest financial report showed modest profits and pointed to no immediate disaster.
If any project is going to change Remedy’s finances, we would bet on the remake of the first two Max Payne games, now in development in collaboration with Rockstar Games. That looks more likely than Control Resonant to decide where the studio goes next.
None of this has hurt the legend. In the popular telling, Remedy is a lone survivor staking everything to make original, artistically bold big-budget games on its own terms. The huge scale of those games somehow makes its struggle seem more heroic than that of a tiny studio like Yacht Club Games, which really did risk financial ruin to make Mina the Hollower. In the end, Remedy’s games are the safer commercial bets, but the story doesn’t feel that way.
Where the votes could tip
Remedy is an easy studio to root for, and it is easy to want it to win. We suspect that feeling reaches The Game Awards jury just as it reaches the pirates on Reddit, and it could push a few votes toward Control Resonant.
If Resonant is called out in the Game of the Year category this December, the game should not get all the credit. Some of it belongs to a crowd of pirates urging each other to open their wallets.