Whether you buy into the awards season or not, it’s an ideal opportunity to reflect on the past twelve months; for the most part we’ve been highlighting the very best games of 2024, but it hasn’t all been sunshine and lollipops.
It’s been another year of breakout hits and exciting announcements, brought down by some pretty major flops and worrying wider trends.It goes without saying, really.
If last year’s layoffs weren’t devastating enough for the industry, 2024 took things to the next level with thousands more workers losing their jobs without an end in site.
Game developers around the globe have been forced to downsize, merge, or close their doors for good with high profile casualties including Microsoft’s Tango Gameworks (thankfully rescued a few months later by Krafton) and Arkane Austin, as well as myriad smaller studios and indies.From rising development costs and changes in consumer habits to the post-pandemic lurch, the video game business is still ludicrously lucrative, but money is pooling around a smaller number of key pillars of gaming than before, making big bets increasingly risky.The job losses have been catastrophic, resulting in countless workers leaving the games industry for good, the ensuing instability no doubt warding off a generation of up-and-coming talent in the process.
It’s not just those who create your favourite games either, it’s those who report on them with a large number of media outlets either been scaled back or shut down completely, displacing an untold number of journalists.There was one pretty big omission from the previous section: the closure of Sony’s Firewalk Studios and the embarrassing eradication of its one and only game, Concord.