2024 Was the Worst Best Year In Gaming

2024 was a momentous year for the industry in a lot of ways, and most of them aren’t very good. While it can’t be denied that there were tons of excellent games released over the year, there’s simply no denying that 2024 was a terrible year in gaming history.

That’s a bit of a weird statement to come to terms with because, personally, 2024 was the year I played more new games than ever before. Sure, a part of that can surely be chalked up to work, but it seemed like every month, and at some points every week, there was a new game that I wanted to play. It started in January with The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth and just kept trucking along to December, with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind being my latest obsession. I played over two dozen new games to completion, and that isn’t even counting my backlog of titles from this year that I haven’t gotten to yet.

If you were just looking at the year by the quality of games that came out, then 2024 may be one of the best years in gaming. But the industry doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s the industry that’s the issue. As the year went on, it became clearer and clearer that the business of making video games is simply in a bad place and virtually impossible to overlook. Nearly all aspects of the business are either regressing or are barely holding it together.

A part of me was wondering which point I should start with, but that’s difficult to figure out given just how many terrible news stories hit this past year. We could always just start off with massive layoffs and how nearly 15,000 jobs were lost, a number that eclipses last year’s layoffs. There are also several studio closures, like how Microsoft shuttered severe well-known studios back in May and how Firewalk Studios was closed after Concord‘s untimely demise (called that, by the way). Oh, and let’s not forget about the cratering of the live-service trend with projects like Concord, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, and XDefiant being dead on arrival and costing hundreds of millions.

And then you just have the tragedy of critically acclaimed games being seen as failures in the eyes of corporations. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is easily one of the best games of the year, but it was seen as a financial disappointment by Ubisoft, the same company that had a year so disastrous that there are not-so-silent rumors it’s going to be bought out. Then you have Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, another Game of the Year contender, which was seen by Square Enix as being unable to meet sales expectations, all but guaranteeing that future Final Fantasy games won’t have the same lavish production as that critical masterpiece.

And I could keep going on if I wanted to. That’s kind of the point. 2024 was such a mess of a year that I could systematically go through each month and say everything that went wrong that sends foreboding messages about the industry’s future. The AAA industry is in trouble, plain and simple. Big-budget games are becoming more and more homogenized and lackluster, chasing trends and refusing to innovate in pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. It doesn’t matter if the games are good anymore. What matters is they make money, but because major AAA companies are so poorly managed, that’s virtually impossible now. You could have all the marketing tools in the world to try and spin Skull & Bones as a desirable “AAA” game, that doesn’t change the fact it was so poorly managed and developed that it was never going to turn a profit.

Of course, none of that actually inhibited my ability to enjoy the games I played, but it seems that for every little bit of joy that cropped up in the past year, someone or something was adamant to destroy that joy. Maybe it was the immediate vitriol to the announcement of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet or how fans of Black Myth: Wukong immediately took to the usual forums to voice their hatred of Astro Bot after its Game Awards win. A game that brought me that much joy was seen as an affront to the vocal minority. So should I feel ashamed of liking what I do? Hell no, but the point still stands that no matter where you go, negativity seems to thrive now instead of optimism.

It’s all just so tiring. 2024 was a tiring year. I loved so many games this year, but I had to isolate myself to fully enjoy them. I couldn’t hear about the horrors that the developers went through to release the game, or how certain online groups lose their minds over the most insignificant and trite parts of a game, or how every other segment of the industry was falling apart around me. Make no mistake, I love video games. Always have, always will. But 2024 taught me that everything else about the industry deserves to be called out for it toxic effect on the medium.

With 2025 on the horizon, my expectations for the future are low. Of course, there are plenty of games coming out that I’m looking forward to, but they aren’t AAA games. They’re games from smaller studios, like the upcoming Tormented Souls 2, Split Fiction, and the new Professor Layton game are all up my alley. I just simply don’t have faith anymore that the mainstream gaming industry and the people who propagate it will do anything to prevent its slow but inevitable decline. I’m not saying that a crash is going to happen, but 2025 seems like the year at least one major studio will suffer irrevocable damages to the point where their demise will serve as a wake-up call for the rest of the industry to change its ways. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.