The yearly awards season is always a great time to look back and reflect on the highs of the video games industry of the previous twelve months, and there really have been a lot of highlights! There’s been unexpected hits in the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, there’s been long-awaited sequels like Hollow Knight: Silksong that actually manage to live up to the expectations… but to focus only on the highs is to overlook the troubles and major failings that continue to plague the industry through the past half decade.
Once again it’s studio closures and layoffs that are the biggest disappointment of our year, and while job losses were nowhere near the extent of what we saw in 2024, they were still hugely impactful.
One of the biggest examples of this was Warner Bros. Games Studios closing Monolith, Player First Games and WB Games San Diego in one fell swoop, cancelling the long-in-development Wonder Woman game in the process. It was another super hero game involved when EA cancelled their Black Panther game and closed Cliffhanger Games, we also saw Ubisoft Leamington closing its doors, Avalanche’s Liverpool studio, Microsoft’s The Initiative, and job losses at King of Meat developer Glowmade, People Can Fly, Jagex, Don’t Nod, Crytek, and so many more.
It certainly feels more difficult than ever to manage to bring a game to release and then get it the notice and attention that it needs to survive (not least when a live service is planned around it), but there’s too many instances where very profitable companies are making cuts with some handwaving about AI to sweeten their investor, or where some degree of mismanagement has led to a game’s development drifting and sliding to the point it’s unsalvageable.
Here’s hoping that 2026 can see us turning a corner.
EA’s Saudi-funded Buyout – Also Disappointing
It’s not just financial bankruptcy that we have to worry about in the games industry, but a moral bankruptcy as well. With Electronic Arts announcing that they had agreed to sell their company entirely to private investment, with the cash coming from Silver Lake Management, which is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and a much smaller stake going to Affinity Partners, the company of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s… which is also backed by the PIF.
Saudi money has been flooding out of the oil-rich country and its fellow Gulf states for a long time, most commonly seen as various acts of “sports washing” to distract from and diminish the impact of things like the country’s stance on women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, the assassination of outspoken Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and other human rights violations. PIF money has gone towards buying up football teams, founding golf tournaments, securing motorsports races, and more. However, it’s also been a part of gaming for a long time, and the Public Investment Fund already owned 10% of Electronic Arts and all of Niantic., It also has stakes in Riot Games, Activision Blizzard, Nintendo, Take Two, Capcom, Embracer, Nexon, and Koei Tecmo. They’ve also taken ownership of SNK and the Esports World Cup.
Buying up EA is their biggest move yet for the games industry, and it’s deeply concerning on so many levels for how this is inevitably getting the green light from the US government, for what this means for EA’s workforce when there’s talk of widespread use of generative AI, and obviously on a moral and cultural level. Will this see LGBTQ+ positive campaigns be sidelined in EA’s football games, and more significantly, the impact this will have on The Sims ability to represent its community.
Whatever it is that Xbox is doing… – Also Disappointing
Having spent so long rebuilding and expanding their gaming business through the trying times of the Xbox One generation, to see Microsoft meander and slide through the 2020s has just been a bit sad. Sad and confusing.
2025 was another year in which we felt the way that the Xbox business is shifting away from being a direct competitor to Sony and Nintendo and towards just being another publisher on their platforms. More Microsoft-published games were confirmed and released for PS5, and that has led to significant points in time where the majority of the best-selling games on PlayStation have been Microsoft games – Forza Horizon 5’s port was a big success, for example, and there’s the Halo remake announcement too.
And that cross-platform shift could be a solid direction for Microsoft to take, if didn’t also feel like they were sacrificing everything else they had built up. The Xbox Series consoles have become ludicrously expensive through more price hikes, almost as if they’re being priced to fail, there’s the massive price increases for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate thinly veiled behind added services and content that I doubt many people want.
Of course there were also the mass layoffs in the middle of the year that saw The Initiative shutdown and its Perfect Dark reboot cancelled, the cancellation of Rare’s Everwild, the end of support for the Forza Motorsport franchise (in favour of Forza Horizon), and more.
Part of the undercurrent to all of this are Microsoft’s two biggest bets of the last couple years. The company is all-in on generative AI, needing to show a growing install base, and wanting its employees to be dogfooding while developing, and there’s Activision needing to keep churning out Call of Duty games every single year, which has led to Black Ops 7 fumbling the FPS crown to Battlefield for the first time.
Where will Xbox end up in a few years time? It’s difficult to say, but we want to see it still be relevant outside of being a third party publisher and an increasingly expensive subscription service.
We’ll be back to the lighter and brighter side of gaming tomorrow with our overall Game of the Year winner, but in the meantime, let’s catch up on all the awards so far.
This post offers a thoughtful look at the highs and lows of the gaming year. It’s always interesting to reflect on what resonated with players and what fell short. Thanks for sharing your insights!