Video game publishers are not making enough action games anymore – Reader’s Feature

Doom: The Dark Ages screenshot of the Doomslayer — Doom: The Dark Ages – the 77th best game of 2025 (Bethesda)

With the release schedules for the rest of the year starting to come into a focus, a reader worries that Western publishers are abandoning the idea of the big budget action game.

I’ve recently seen a lot of people complain that there weren’t many Soulslike games last year and that they’re starting to get itchy for a new FromSoftware game. I understand that but I also think it’s part of a wider problem that is going unnoticed and that’s the death of the big budget action game.

That might sound silly but if you remove online multiplayer titles – things like Battlefield and Call Of Duty – from the equation it’s more true than you might realise. For decades now mainstream publishers have been trying to remove the need for skill or thought from video games, because they limit sales.

If you’re not good enough to get past a boss or can’t work out a puzzle you’re going to get stuck and frustrated, and you won’t buy the sequel or anything similar to it. Or at least that’s how companies like EA and Ubisoft see it; companies that would’ve never have dreamed of publishing something like Dark Souls and were probably completely confused by its success.

This has been going on since at least the Xbox 360 era and it naturally means there are less action games overall. Looking at GC’s Top 20 of 2025 all the non-indie action games are Japanese, except for Split Fiction – which I haven’t played and is kind of half-indie anyway, despite being published by EA.

The Metacritic list for 2025 is the same, with the highest ranked Western action game being, ironically, Ghost Of Yōtei at number 37. And that’s it until you get to Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection (a collection of 30+ year old games) at number 72 and then it’s Doom: The Dark Ages at number 77, which I would say is the only straight action game in the whole top 100 that is both not an indie game and made in the West.

Japan has always been known for being better at third person action games but it wasn’t like Western companies didn’t make them or weren’t good at them. We have got a new Gears Of War coming this year, but I notice we haven’t seen anything of it since it was first announced, which isn’t very encouraging.

And there is Wolverine coming out at Christmas, which I think we can all imagine how that will play. There’s also, of course, GTA 6 but the action has always been the worst part of the games. Saros is guaranteed to be better, but it’s so niche it’s practically indie itself, especially compared to GTA.

I feel that there are two factors at work here, the first being that Western developers generally aren’t that good at action. It’s not only the worst thing in GTA but also in Fallout/The Elder Scrolls and other mega successful games like The Witcher.

There are plenty of counter examples to that, of Western games with good action, but I believe the other factor is that publishers don’t want difficult or complicated action anymore. Online multiplayer is different, in their eyes, because that’s what you’re turning up for, but anything that might put people off of buying a game (or spending money on DLC, as is more important nowadays) is, to them, a problem that needs to be solved.

I think Sony are part of the problem because they used to nurture a lot of action adventures but now they’re so rare it feels like the whole concept of a triple-A action game has become a rarity.
While there are still great games being made today, so much of it feels like it’s tiptoeing around the concept of what a video game actually is. Games are so expensive to make now they don’t dare ask any effort of their players, especially when it comes to skill and unfamiliar ideas.

The success of Elden Ring has given me hope in recent years but the fact that Western companies are still holding back from its lessons is disappointing. As of right now the only big budget Western made action games for 2026, that I’m aware of, are Saros and Wolverine, plus 007 First Light (which seems to be at least 50% Hitman style stealth) and Lego Batman: Legacy Of The Dark Knight.

That’s a very limited, to put things diplomatically, selection and the worse thing is I’m not sure that list is going to be very different by the end of the year.

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By reader Eden92