Happy New Year!We’ve made it once more around the Sun, putting 2024 behind us and looking forward to a 2025 that’s full of hope, optimism and brightness… OK, so this coming year (and the next four years, truth be told) are sure to instil a lot of fear and trepidation in a lot of people around the world, but if the real world is looking to be rather doomy and gloomy, at least we have games to look forward to.
There’s even a new Doom!On the gaming front, 2024 was a year with a lot of highs and lows. Perhaps more than any other year, this past twelve months were stacked with remakes and remasters, with Silent Hill 2 and Persona 3 Reload really standing out as being the equal of new big budget games.
And what games those were, as well? Helldivers 2 and Palworld made the start of the year about silly co-op action, the end of the year was really all about Astro Bot, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and a great Call of Duty in the form of Black Ops 6, and it was all capped – Fedora’d? – off by Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.However, there’s been a lot of change across the industry this year.
Ignominious flops in the form of Suicide Squad and Concord – the latter failing so badly that Sony delisted the game and shut down the debutant studio – made the risks of big budget game development and the expectations of live service games more apparent than ever.
Meanwhile, major companies continued to make layoffs and shut down studios including Microsoft shuttering Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks (the latter rescued a few months later by Krafton) and Arkane Austin, Ubisoft closing down XDefiant, Meta closing Ready at Dawn, London Studio closing, and more.It’s really saying something when one of the standout moments of The Game Awards wasn’t a GOTY acceptance speech or glitzy new trailer, but rather the highlighting of the work of Amir Satvat, setting up a community for the thousands affected by the mass layoffs.