2025 will be a make-or-break year for triple-A video games as we know them

It might even be a good thing.

Cast your eyes across the 2025 video game release schedule and you might notice a bit of a trend. There are triple-A games here. In fact, there are a lot of triple-A video games here. After a desperately barren year for them in 2024 - plenty of good games and surprisingly successful games; very few big, expensive ventures you'd hang your hat on - in 2025, the triple-A blockbuster is well and truly back.

It's worth a quick runthrough here, just to take in the scale of it. The first real rush starts in a bizarrely busy February, where Avowed, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Assassin's Creed Shadows and Monster Hunter Wilds make up the four horsemen of the open world action adventure apocalypse, backed up by Civilization 7 and Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. It's hard to exaggerate: this is a completely ridiculous release slate for February - I'm struggling to remember another month like it, let alone one outside the usual Q4 crush.

After that, things get a bit woolier in terms of dates - there's almost nothing with a solid one beyond March - but just have a look at what else is coming from the big-budget end of the industry this year. Microsoft's output has clunked into gear at last, with Fable, Doom: The Dark Ages, The Outer Worlds 2 and inevitably a new Call of Duty due in 2025. Sony has Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yotei dated for this year (and, though it probably won't be Sony's by the time it launches, there's also Elden Ring Nightreign coming soon). Nintendo has Metroid Prime 4, Pokémon Legends Z-A, and whatever else might appear as launch window games for the Switch 2 (my bet's on Mario Kart).

Then there are the multiplatform releases: there's the flashy Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra from Amy Hennig's new team, and the very BioShock-like Judas, from Ken Levine's new studio. There's the long-awaited Skate 4, and the equally long-awaited Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. There'll probably be something from EA, beyond its usual wave of sports games like EA FC, and no doubt more big bets from Tencent and NetEase, like the upcoming Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, or South Korea's burgeoning industry such as Crimson Desert. And it's a particularly massive year for 2K, which on top of Civ 7 also has Borderlands 4, Mafia: The Old Country and of course, the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, Grand Theft Auto 6.

Crimson Desert, which continues to make me picture a black forest gateaux rather than a video game but is, in fact, a huge, single-player, triple-A action adventure from the makers of Black Desert Online. | Image credit: Pearl Abyss

All these are just the real headlines, and just the ones we know about right now. But while in any other year we'd be saying "triple-A games are back" and leaving it at that - the sign of an industry continuing the cycle of busier years and quieter years, for instance, or the green shoots showing after a bit of a post-covid blip maybe - in this case that wouldn't feel quite right.

2024 was not an ordinary year, and nor was 2023 before it. Across the past 24 months a total of at least 25,000 people who work in video games have lost their jobs (a minimum of 10,400 in 2023 and 14,600 in 2024). Dozens of studios have closed. Entire publishing monoliths have all but collapsed. The result has been a year-long existential crisis. Microsoft (and plenty of others) thinks we need to grow the market. Shawn Layden thinks we need more double-A games again. Most developers, I'd wager, reckon you should give teams the time and space to be creative and experiment with building something new.

Whatever the solution, the problem has to be recognised. Traditional triple-A games - namely, games with high-end, cutting edge graphics and large, ambitious worlds - are now very, very expensive and take a very, very long time to make. That means their success is even more important - but at the same time, that success feels less of a guarantee than ever. Research is showing that the new generation of players, Gen Z and even younger than that, 'Gen Alpha', don't really care about graphics. They play Blox Fruits and Dress to Impress in Roblox, or Fortnite, Minecraft, and Lethal Company - or even Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, a pair of games with notoriously poor graphical performance that are also the third-highest grossing Pokémon games of all time.

Dress to Impress, in its glory. | Image credit: Roblox / Eurogamer

Talk to a small or independent developer and they might tell you their sphere of the gaming ecosystem has already changed. The way funding works has shifted, they might say: instead of one game requiring £10m in funding, it's 10 £1m games that get off the ground - 10 bets on landing the next Balatro or Vampire Survivors, instead of one punt on a Hades or a Stray. Strange Scaffold, ostensibly an indie development studio but really more of a development network, released three games in 2024 alone, in I Am Your Beast, Clickolding, and Life Eater. All of them are very good, tightly focused ideas made on small budgets, and all of them last just a few hours.

Look down the list of major triple-A games coming this year, however, and it's easy to conclude that part of the industry has simply failed to learn the same lesson. In reality it's probably a bit more complex. There's a bit of a time lag at work here, I suspect. Many of the games coming in 2025 will have been in development since long before this current crisis became evident. There's probably a few lingering, Covid-enforced delays, and a bit of good old fashioned coincidence behind so many arriving at once now. But there will also be stubbornness and a retreat to safe ground, undoubtedly - more remakes, sequels, reboots and franchises, more narrowly defined open world action games with yellow paint or grapple hooks or skill trees, or whatever else fits the perception of popular mainstream design.

If not some kind of triple-A reckoning, nor triumphant return of the blockbuster then, 2025 will instead most likely be a test. And probably a very important one at that. There'll be hope that GTA 6 and the Switch 2 arrive with the same world-conquering success as their predecessors. That the rising tide of these two big ships pulling into harbour helps lift all the other still-pretty-big boats. That the attention their assumed success brings means renewed optimism for video games, and a renewed willingness from the wider public to stay indoors and play them, instead of sticking to their current fixations on going outside to attend music festivals or travel the world (shudder!). Importantly: a renewed wave of lovely, low-interest investment.

Clickolding - an example of viral, TikTok-fuelled simplicity. | Image credit: Strange Scaffold

If things go well, we might be looking at another uptick in the cycle. A round of hiring and expansion, a boom year where many feel that, with some of those old roles recreated and refilled once more - and startup studios finding funding again - balance has been restored (institutional knowledge be damned, of course).

The one, small worry - and for now it's only small - is that few truly gigantic, era-defining video games do the same thing as the last. And that the sure things of 2013 and 2017 might not be such sure things again here in 2025. This is a world where YouTube and Twitch - the giants of that era - are having a bit of a wobble of their own. TikTok didn't exist then either; today it's a kingmaker, the fuel on the fire for Helldivers 2, Clickolding and Dress to Impress alike. It's not only the video games industry that's changed since the 2010s. It's the whole ecosystem around it.

What if the worst were to happen, then? If this year were to be full of big, high cost releases but not enough big, high revenue successes? And if the lessons from that were to finally make their way into the rooms where the biggest decisions are made? Lessons such as: return on investment isn't guaranteed when making video games; that breakout hits come from the arrival of something new, and that creating something new takes time, space and trust; that great, creative people need room to try and fail. What then? That's when we really do get into unknown territory. It might be a slow trickle. It might be a bloodbath. It might not mean any change at all, as the industry sputters and trundles on, its habits too ingrained, its structures and rhythms too big to fail. Or it might, even, mean an eventual change for the better.