As we close out another year, I find myself doing something I’ve not done for a long time: writing an editorial, an actual Vic B’Stard’s state of play. And what a state it is.

I found 2024 to be a disappointing year for games. 2023 was pretty poor, but 2024 continued the spiral.

As publishers blame players for not appreciating the effort that goes into creating their mediocre fayre, the gaming press has all but dried up, replaced by paid-up shills. A great game in 2024 equates to a good effort pre-COVID (I’m looking at you, Dr. Jones).

The last cohort of gaming journalists has finally reached the point whereby they’ve realised that they will need more than the pocket change that they earn writing about video games to buy a house and/or raise a family. Similarly, the media corporations that once invested wholesale in gaming press sites have been shuttering outlets left, right and centre.

For what purports to be a multi-billion-dollar industry that dwarfs any other entertainment industry, the video game industry seems pretty fucked at the moment. I don’t really know why, but, from my observations over the past decade, I’d say it had a lot to do with immaturity and hubris. COVID may just have been the last straw. Perhaps this decline, the poor sales and the layoffs are a necessary part of the industry’s growth.

There’s also the clash between sort of people with the cash to invest and those who make video games. The senior developers are nerds the same age as me who likely grew up tinkering with computers in their formative years. You can bet the money men were not doing the same. As with our appalling politicians, they are likely technologically illiterate. Who needs to know how stuff works if you can pay someone to do it for you?

It would be easy to blame quotas, DEI and ESG-captured corporations for some of the wacky design decisions. But I’m not sure that that is entirely the case. Whilst there’s no reason why narratives shouldn’t have a message, in the past they’ve not been quite so on the nose. Indeed, it seems that developers are behaving as if they are siloed, working in echo chambers, something that perhaps does stem from COVID.

Publishers are getting genuinely rattled when the gaming community turns on them. Perhaps this is the reason for some of these PR nightmare-style responses. Blaming the audience for not appreciating your products didn’t work for Disney and it won’t work for Ubisoft.

Meanwhile, the gaming press, what’s left of them, still lament the length of games, craving shorter playtimes (that take less time to review, ahem). Reviewers are seemingly oblivious to the fact that games cost a fortune to buy, and 120 hours of content actually represents good value to players, rather than more pressure due to a looming review deadline.

We’ve had sequels to absolute corkers, that should have been a slam dunk, fail to live up to the standard set by their predecessors. A trend that started last year with the lamentable Kerbal Space Program 2 and Cities Skylines 2 has continued with both Planet Coaster 2 and Flight Simulator 2024 both falling short of their predecessors.

There’s been a few games that fell so hard that they took their developers with them. Live service misstep, Concord closed so fast I didn’t get the chance to even finish my review. Suicide Squad took a great idea and shoe-horned it into a game format that managed to make a wasted opportunity of most of DC Comics AAA characters.

The best games of the year have all been remakes and reboots. PC gamers have done particularly well with Sony porting over Ghost of Tsushima, God of War: Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West Complete and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. Rockstar, as well, gave PC gamers a treat with Red Dead Redemption. Then there’s the remastered Silent Hill 2 and Until Dawn.

This has made game reviews a bit of a chore, to be honest, making me favour hardware reviews, instead. It’s difficult to review a game that you had high hopes for only to have those hopes dashed when you realise that the developers have missed the mark. It’s all I can do to hold back my disappointment and review it with a bias for the game it isn’t rather than the game it is.

It’s not been all bad, though, with the likes of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, Alan Wake 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3. I even enjoyed Star Wars Outlaws (though many did not).

I’m hoping that this lull passes in 2025. Perhaps development teams will reorganise and regroup in a more collaborative environment. Maybe management will realise that there’s only so much bullshit that players can take and that unsubtly forcing unpopular or controversial opinions into games will affect the bottom line. Then we can draw a line under it all and move on.

So as we say good riddance to 2024, here’s to 2025.

Fingers crossed.

Vic B’Stard.