Why 2024 Is the Year of the Survival Game

There have been a few gaming trends in 2024, but one of the biggest has to be the rise of survival games. It’s been a nonstop rollercoaster ride for fans of chopping down trees and smashing rocks, and it’s not stopping any time soon.

Not Your Mama’s Pikachu

If all we do is look at January, you’ve got Palworld, which was quite possibly the most popular launch of all time, with over two million players playing at the same time at one point. The only game to beat this ever is PUBG: Battlegrounds back in January 2018, and even intensely popular games like Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 never broke the one million mark.

Also in January, we got Enshrouded, which is an excellent ARPG survival game where you can play around with classic fantasy classes in between building your ideal holiday home and trying to save the world. This would have been substantially more popular were it not for Palworld deciding to launch just a few days before it.

February brought Nightingale with its Fae Realms and rocky start, but that’s been doing a lot better since the offline mode launched, and then April gave us Bellwright, which is a whole other style of survival game. That’s an absurdly strong first four titles, and we’re fully aware there are probably a lot of good ones we’ve missed, too.

It’s Gonna Be May

Let’s talk May quickly – well, quickly-ish. Abiotic Factor, V Rising, and Soulmask all launched in the fifth month of the year. All three of these are good takes on the survival genre, and while V Rising had been out in Early Access for a while, the full release was simply a game changer. Abiotic Factor wins extra points for being very funny to play with friends, and Soulmask has a really cool core concept, too.

Related: How Earth Defense Force Developed a Massive Cult Following

Then, looking forward from that banger of a month, we’ve got the full release of Core Keeper, which is an exceptionally good Terraria-like that we implore you to play, and even Streets of Rogue 2 is getting in on the action with new building mechanics as well. Is the latter a true survival game? Probably not, but you can build in it, and we’re excited about it, so here we are.

I Will Survive

So, uh, what gives? It’s almost impossible to say what it is that’s made all of these games hit so close together. The initial wave of survival games, those powered by Minecraft being released, has been over for roughly a decade at this point, but the genre’s never really weakened. The most obvious choice for the inspiration here could well be Valheim, a survival game that puts a bit more focus on the fights than just the farming.

It could also just be that we, as players, just really want to become self-sufficient as the world around us crumbles and our ability to control our fates diminishes. But hey, maybe they’re just fun, and chopping wood is good for the soul, even if it’s digital wood.