As 2024 began, the most commonly expressed concern in the gaming industry about this year was that it would have a very sparse and disappointing release calendar, at least compared to the spectacular highlights of 2023. This was, in a sense, a ripple effect of the pandemic years: In A backlog of delayed software hit the market throughout 2023, meaning many major studios will still be in the early stages of new projects. The 2024 lineup didn’t look very inspiring.

In hindsight, this fear didn’t quite come true; or at least the dip in the 2024 release schedule we experienced was pretty unevenly distributed across different parts of the industry.

Fears of an overall fallow year in 2024 have not come true – at least not for everyone

Ultimately, from a consumer perspective, it was actually a pretty solid year for gaming. Ultimately, you might think of it as the calm before the GTA 6 storm of 2025, but this year has held up remarkably well thanks to a combination of hit titles that no one really expected – Helldivers 2 and Astro Bot in particular to be highlighted as they saved Sony Otherwise, it would have been a pretty shockingly empty year in the middle of the console cycle – and there were some games, especially in the second half of the year, that really exceeded expectations.

In terms of exceeding expectations, a number of games emerged that were largely dismissed as development hell nightmares and actually ended up being pretty good. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the best example; Personally, I find the gameplay to be a little too different from previous games in the series for my liking, but on its own terms it’s a very enjoyable game and far better than many people had dared to hope after playing for so many years.

Silent Hill 2 is a remake. I don’t think many people expected it to be this good, despite the developer’s experience in the horror genre. The real unexpected surprise of the year, however, is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – a title that honestly doesn’t have the right to be quite as fun as it actually is.

Fears of an overall fallow year have not come true – at least not for everyone. For some publishers, the risk that 2024 could be a lost year was well founded, as quite a few companies were unable to find a successful title from one year end to the next.

Poor old Ubisoft is the unwilling flag bearer for this unfortunate bunch; It was probably hoped that the relatively quiet release schedules of some other major publishers would give Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin’s Creed Shadows a chance to shine, but the former title sank (presumably a victim of Disney’s mishandling of the Star Wars brand, as well all other). Problem with Ubisoft itself) and the latter has been postponed to 2025. Ubisoft isn’t the only publisher that has struggled to find hits in 2024, but its continued struggle to reinvent and reinvigorate its business will likely stretch well into next year.

However, it wasn’t just certain publishers that had a difficult 2024; The year’s successes were also distributed rather unevenly across the game genres. I wrote last week about the torrid year that live service gaming has had, with high-profile failures ranging from Sony’s Concord disaster to announcements that games like Suicide Squad and XDefiant would be shutting down. Helldivers 2 and Marvel Rivals have been the only real bright spots in this market, although it’s worth noting that established games like Fortnite continue to do very well even as the live service model is breaking everywhere (and even the beleaguered and struggling Overwatch 2 appears). to have had a bit of a comeback year).

On the other hand, it was a great year for single-player action games, thanks to titles like Black Myth Wukong, Stellar Blade, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and many others. By the way, it’s no coincidence that two of the highlights mentioned here – Marvel Rivals and Black Myth Wukong – come from Chinese developers; After many false starts and huge investments, this was the year that China really began to flex its muscles as one of the most important global game development centers. Still, I suspect that in retrospect this will be the case. Looking at 2024 from the perspective of the future, the most important story will be what happened to Microsoft this year.

(The Activision Blizzard purchase) was always part of a major business transformation in the making, and Xbox’s existing identity as a platform was always under scrutiny

This has been an incredibly pivotal year for Microsoft’s strategy as a games publisher and platform holder, as the company undertakes one of the boldest and arguably most difficult shifts ever undertaken by any company in this industry. It is a transition that seemed inevitable to many observers of the battle to buy Activision Blizzard – there were many who warned that the completion of this acquisition would effectively mean the end of Xbox as we knew it – but he still seems to have caught many of the most ardent Xbox fans off guard (most of whom were still vocal supporters of the deal in question).

Spending so much money to buy one of the biggest publishers in the industry is never just about propping up a console business that is consistently losing out to both Sony and Nintendo in the global market. This was always going to be a huge business shift, and Xbox’s existing identity as a platform was always under scrutiny.

Microsoft has become one of the largest and most influential publishers in the world (massively helped this year by Black Ops 6 as the highlight of the series’ recent history and the huge response to Indiana Jones in that role), but in the process It has become something completely different than a traditional platform holder. Xbox hardware will now inevitably play second fiddle to the broader idea of ​​Xbox as a platform service and Microsoft as a third-party games provider. The resulting business will undoubtedly be more robust and successful; It remains to be seen whether it will still be the same as Xbox has been in the past.

One thing to watch carefully in the coming months is consumer response to the “This Is An Xbox” campaign, which is a bold attempt to explain and outline this complex strategy to a broad consumer audience. I don’t want to take away from the campaign (it’s a very well-executed piece of marketing), but would like to make an anecdotal judgment based on the confused reactions I’ve personally heard: I’m not sure it’s received quite as much as Microsoft hoped .

As a result, 2025 could well be a year of experimentation for the company as it tries to explain what exactly Xbox means now to a wide audience that isn’t quite as familiar with the boardroom buzzwords as the people to whom these ideas were pitched internally became.

As always, we end the year with some broad strokes outlining what next year is likely to look like. We know that to a large extent it depends on the impact of GTA 6 and the launch of Nintendo’s new console. We can expect stories like Microsoft’s repositioning and re-declaration of Xbox, Ubisoft’s attempts to rebuild its publishing success, and the ongoing implosion of the live service dream to continue to develop throughout the year.

However, we can at least hope that the massive wave of layoffs and studio closures that have hit the headlines over the last two years won’t follow us into 2025; Instead, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a year full of green shoots and optimism.