Whether you buy into the awards season or not, it’s an ideal opportunity to reflect on the past twelve months; for the most part we’ve been highlighting the very best games of 2024, but it hasn’t all been sunshine and lollipops. It’s been another year of breakout hits and exciting announcements, brought down by some pretty major flops and worrying wider trends.
It goes without saying, really. If last year’s layoffs weren’t devastating enough for the industry, 2024 took things to the next level with thousands more workers losing their jobs without an end in site. Game developers around the globe have been forced to downsize, merge, or close their doors for good with high profile casualties including Microsoft’s Tango Gameworks (thankfully rescued a few months later by Krafton) and Arkane Austin, as well as myriad smaller studios and indies.
From rising development costs and changes in consumer habits to the post-pandemic lurch, the video game business is still ludicrously lucrative, but money is pooling around a smaller number of key pillars of gaming than before, making big bets increasingly risky.
The job losses have been catastrophic, resulting in countless workers leaving the games industry for good, the ensuing instability no doubt warding off a generation of up-and-coming talent in the process. It’s not just those who create your favourite games either, it’s those who report on them with a large number of media outlets either been scaled back or shut down completely, displacing an untold number of journalists.
Concord – Also Disappointing
There was one pretty big omission from the previous section: the closure of Sony’s Firewalk Studios and the embarrassing eradication of its one and only game, Concord. The writing was on the wall though we didn’t expect things to pan out quite so disastrously for everyone involved.
It’s clear that Sony, like every major publisher, has been wanting a larger slice of the live service pie for a long time now. However, arriving so late to the party with Concord – long after Overwatch, Fortnite, and Warzone – the remaining crumbs were little to sustain a modest multiplayer title, let alone an ambitious new IP with a hulking AAA budget. It didn’t matter how strong the core gameplay was, there just wasn’t enough interest. And instead of dangling a roadmap in front of players and relying on them to occasionally splurge on a neat skin or battle pass as Warner Bros. did with the year’s other huge flop, Suicide Squad, Sony axed the game within weeks of its big launch and closed the studio a couple months later.
After a recent winning streak, this comes as a real blow to the PlayStation brand and is sure to have a ripple effect on other multiplayer projects Sony had in the pipeline, as well as its willingness to invest in new IP.
Toxic Gamers – Also Disappointing
Toxicity has always been an issue in gaming. However, where it was once limited to multiplayer trash-talking and forum board trolling, it has become a industry within itself. A machine fuelled by blind hatred and misinformation, piloted by talentless husks who try to make a living from inciting “anti-woke” rage while never creating anything of value themselves. The mere presence of minority representation or, God forbid, a modestly clothed female protagonist, is met with senseless vitriol.
It’s a sickening trend that has made online gaming spaces less and less habitable by folks with a reasonable brain cell count and always begs the questions – why are people, particularly grown men, getting so upset about entertainment products? The second-hand embarrassment is almost unbearable.
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
