Video games in 2024: Eager anticipation, or just treading water?

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Bookended by the long-awaited trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI (which rapidly passed 100m views to become the most-watched game reveal ever) and the trailer-fest of the Game Awards, this week has given us a lot of glimpses of in-development games – but perhaps more than anything else, it's been a great week for aficionados of games you won't be playing until 2025 at the earliest.

With a few notable exceptions, what we saw this week was mostly the beginning of the process of building hype for games that will appear in 2025 and beyond, which makes it hard to ignore the point raised by many of the analysts James spoke to about the GTA 6 trailer this week: that 2024 is looking a little sparse on the release calendar front, and it's hard to see what the drivers of industry growth will be in the coming 12 months or so.

Of course, early looks at games that are still a year or two away aren't so unusual, but I'd argue that it's a little unusual that we're seeing quite so much of that at this point in a hardware cycle. Mid-cycle, with the installed base of current-gen consoles hitting a level that's comfortably able to sustain blockbusters, we normally have more of a balance between games that are approaching their pre-order window, major releases in the coming year, and more speculative looks at games a year or more down the pipeline.

Given how heavily that balance is currently tilted towards the latter – not just in this week's announcements, but in the publicly announced release pipeline more generally – it's fair to be a little concerned that the industry could just end up treading water next year.

It's hard to overstate just how much impact GTA 6