2024 has been a year of incredible videogames. It's also been bloody: just like 2023 before it, there have been thousands of layoffs, dozens of studio closures, failures from companies that we once assumed were too big to fail. GameStop shut down Game Informer, the only other surviving gaming magazine in the US, as its CEO honed his corporate strategy to tweeting "TRUMP" 700 times in a row. Elon Musk threw in with the "games are too woke" crowd. As I reflect on the year and try to hold those two thoughts in my head—it's been another great year for games, and another terrible year for the games industry—another more nebulous one is floating around the edges, harder to fully grasp.
I've never seen so many people more frequently, loudly express some version of the same core feeling: 'The system is broken.'
It's something like this: After yet another year of good games but bad times, the mood is changing, reaching an "enough of this shit" threshold that could begin to rumble the status quo.
That's the rough conclusion I come to after straining to Human Centipede all of these 2024 events, and more, into one monstrously fused thought:
I don't think the games industry is having the kind of epiphany that, were we on the Titanic, would see us spinning the wheel just in the nick of time to avoid the iceberg. I think we already hit the iceberg awhile ago, and more and more people onboard mid-sink are finally like, "Hey, whose fault is it we hit that freaking iceberg? This sucks!!"
I've never seen so many people more frequently, loudly express some version of the same core feeling: "The system is broken." Fifteen years ago I don't remember a near-unanimous response to layoffs or studio closures or a massive AAA game flop being: "This is the executives' fault. Why don't they get laid off or take a pay cut?" There are even more dramatic echoes of this shift building in our culture beyond games, with alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione becoming a symbol for an entire country's frustration with a broken healthcare system.
A million social media posts declaring the system is broken or that game CEOs should be fired instead of their staff won't necessarily lead to proactive change, but I've never felt like gaming is more fed up and ready for a vibe shift.
As explored by The Cut a couple years ago, a vibe shift is the moment "a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated." It's a malleable concept more directly aimed at broader fashion and pop culture, but if you've been playing games long enough you can probably identify the eras or trends popular enough to permeate gaming culture so thoroughly they became a vibe, suddenly ubiquitous:
That list could go on and on, back and back to the era of Sega Does What Nintendon't. Each was dominant in gaming culture until it wasn't, when a vibe shift came to sweep us along to the new thing.
If a seismic gaming vibe shift is coming, then, it'll be driven both by the fallout of 2023 and 2024 and the major events of 2025, many of which we can already see coming:
We wrote about the dangers of the unlimited content churn in 2019 and have expressed our exhaustion with live service games more than a few times; we felt it at the end of 2023, and still feel it at the end of 2024. You could point to that as proof that 2025 will just be more of the same.
But my gut says that conversation's finally shifting.
More people than ever are now vocally and angrily drawing the line between the corporate decisions to endlessly develop certain types of games with the layoffs that happen when those games fail; and as more and more of them do fail, spoiling the big bets that executives made years ago, we'll arrive at a fork in the road.
Either big game companies begin to loudly and publicly start to pivot, changing their marketing strategies to highlight more personal, artistic creations, deliberately invoking inspirations like Baldur's Gate 3, pushing new ways to monetize their games other than battle passes, promising a less-tiring and more creative alternative to "seasons" as an endless churn of new stuff… or we just keep the rudder locked in place, drilling further and further into that iceberg.
Nothing has to change. The vibe can continue while Ubisoft as we know it dies, megacorps buy up more and more studios and then shut them down after a single failure. We can keep on like this; we'll lose more talent, sure, but there will always be new bodies for the grist mill. But it seems to me that maybe in 2025, maybe in 2026, enough people are going to be well and truly sick enough of all that to start turning the wheel just a few degrees.
If there's one single person's prediction about the next few years in gaming I'd like to believe in, it's the one Larian founder Swen Vincke shared at this year's Game Awards:
"The oracle told me that the Game of the Year 2025 is going to be made by a studio who found the formula to make it up here on stage. It's stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost. A studio makes a game because they want to make a game they want to play themselves. They created it because it hadn't been created before. They didn't make it to increase market share. They didn't make it to serve the brand. They didn't have to meet arbitrary sales targets, or fear being laid off if they didn't meet those targets.
"Furthermore, the people in charge forbade them from cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue and didn't serve the game design. They didn't treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet. They didn't treat their players as users to exploit. And they didn't make decisions they knew were short-sighted in function of a bonus or politics. They knew that if you put the game and the team first, the revenue will follow. They were driven by idealism, and wanted players to have fun, and they realized that if the developers don't have fun, nobody was going to have any fun. They understood the value of respect, that if they treated their developers and players well, the same developers and players would forgive them when things didn't go as planned. But above all they cared about their games, because they love games. It's really that simple."
If that's not a vibe worth chasing, I don't know what is.
