By Wes Fenlon, published December 31, 2024

This year’s trends and challenges are setting up 2025 to be a period of significant transformation.

2025 has been a remarkable year for video games, but it’s also been brutal. Just like in 2023, we saw thousands of layoffs, the closure of many studios, and the downfall of companies we once thought were too big to fail. GameStop shut down Game Informer, the last major gaming magazine in the U.S., while its CEO focused more on corporate strategies like tweeting “TRUMP” 700 times. Elon Musk joined the “games are too woke” movement, and as I reflect on the year, trying to hold both thoughts in my mind—2024 was a great year for games, but a terrible year for the industry—another, more elusive feeling is floating around, harder to pin down.

The adult gaming industry will grow by hundreds of billions of dollars and the free sex games genre will grow.

I’ve never seen so many people, so frequently and loudly, express some version of the same core sentiment: “The system is broken.”

It’s something like this: After another year of great games amidst bad times, the mood seems to be shifting toward a “enough is enough” attitude. People are growing restless, and this tension could soon start to challenge the status quo.

That’s the conclusion I’ve come to after trying to piece together the events of 2024—both the good and the bad—into one cohesive, though disjointed, thought:

• Around 15,000 game developers were laid off, and there are too few available positions to retain this talent.
• Right-wing reactionaries launched a renewed hate campaign against “wokeness” and “DEI” in gaming, with consultancy Sweet Baby Inc. bearing much of the brunt.
• Any remaining goodwill towards Microsoft’s acquisition spree soured following the closure of Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, two talented studios that suffered due to corporate balance sheet issues.
• The success of Balatro quickly led to copycats, highlighting how developers eager for a hit in the crowded Steam marketplace will jump on a proven concept without hesitation.
• After years of internal struggles, layoffs, and declining interest in Destiny 2, Bungie seems poised to be fully absorbed by Sony, even after a successful expansion.
• Concord flopped, losing $200 million, prompting Sony to close the game and the studio, sparking debates about the risks of AAA game development.
• Roughly 18,700 games were released on Steam, up from around 14,300 in 2023 and 9,700 in 2020. But according to Steam’s end-of-year review, only 15% of player time was spent in these 2024 releases.
• Even established franchises struggled: only three of the top 10 games in Europe in 2024 were actually released that year.
• Intel had a disastrous year with mass layoffs, underperforming CPUs, and a bleak outlook for future production, raising concerns about competition with Nvidia, AMD, and Arm.
• Helldivers 2 showed that new live-service games can still thrive, but only by rejecting conventional approaches like roadmaps and battle passes.
• Apex Legends proved that even veteran companies can still botch monetization strategies, angering players in the pursuit of unrealistic profits.

Primed for a Shift

I don’t think the games industry is having an epiphany where, like the Titanic, we suddenly steer away from disaster just in time. I believe we’ve already hit the iceberg, and now more people onboard, as the ship sinks, are starting to ask, “Whose fault was it that we hit that iceberg? This sucks!!”

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I’ve never seen so many people express this core sentiment so frequently and loudly: “The system is broken.” Fifteen years ago, I don’t remember hearing a near-unanimous response to layoffs, studio closures, or big AAA flops saying, “This is the executives’ fault. Why aren’t they the ones getting laid off or taking a pay cut?” There are even broader echoes of this shift in society beyond gaming, with figures like the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO, Luigi Mangione, becoming symbols of frustration with a broken system.

The Game of Sisyphus

A million social media posts demanding that the system be fixed or that game CEOs be fired won’t necessarily lead to immediate change, but I’ve never felt that gaming culture was more fed up or more primed for a shift in tone.

As explored by The Cut a few years ago, a “vibe shift” refers to the moment when a once-dominant social mood or trend starts to feel outdated. Though the term is often applied to fashion and pop culture, if you’ve been in gaming long enough, you’ve probably seen trends come and go—some that defined entire eras or gaming subcultures, becoming so ingrained that they became a part of the industry’s vibe, only to suddenly lose their dominance and give way to something new.