GameCentral looks back at the last 12 months in gaming and explores how a disastrous year for traditional publishers has been mirrored by breakout success for indie games.
For the last two years our end of year reviews have been pretty morbid affairs. We’ve tried to stay positive and at the end of last year’s we hoped that the endless layoffs and harmful acquisitions would ultimately prove an anomaly and that 2025 would begin to show a more positive way forward. In a way it has but not thanks to anyone that was supposed to be in charge of the games industry.
Layoffs have continued but while they’ve not hit the headlines with quite the same frequency as last year, the ones at Xbox were especially brutal and more are expected in early 2026. That seems to be primarily due to AI, which was merely a concerning trend last year but in 2025 turned into such a plague against humanity that it almost makes Skynet and its terminators seem like a preferable option.
What’s going to happen when the AI bubble bursts we are not in a position to know, except that it’s going to be extremely painful for almost everyone on the planet. It could well prove the final blow for many Western video game publishers, since there are so few of them left who don’t already seem to be on their last legs.
A decade or so ago the games industry seemed sensibly organised into a hierarchy of publishers, with console manufacturers at the top, then giants like Activision and EA, followed by Ubisoft and Take-Two, and then smaller and smaller companies servicing each and every niche in the industry.
As of this moment though that hierarchal organisation no longer exists, as if a bunker busting bomb had detonated at the top of the pyramid. Xbox has, for all intents and purposes, become a third party publisher, as they expended more effort this year trying to push Asus’ ROG Xbox Ally than they did Xbox Series X/S.
The sales figures make clear that the Xbox as a console is now an irrelevance and while Microsoft shows no sign of giving up on gaming, their future now depends solely on selling games on other people’s hardware and hoping that streaming takes off in the way they’ve no doubt promised to their corporate overlords.
If you’d told anyone at the beginning of the generation that Xbox would effectively cease to exist as a console manufacturer by 2025 you would’ve been torn down as zealous fanboy, but it’s not just Xbox. EA has eaten its own tail with a disastrous-seeming corporate buyout, that suddenly saddles them with millions of dollars in debt, and Ubisoft has had to make a deal with Tencent, involving its top franchises, just to stay afloat.
The fate of Warner Bros. Games remains unknown, with its new owner (if it is still Netflix by the time you read this) seemingly indifferent to its existence. Even Activision, which is, of course, owned by Microsoft, seems to be in peril, with this year’s Call Of Duty proving to be possibly the biggest disaster in the franchise’s history. And considering that’s practically the only game Activision makes the dangers can’t be overstated.
As usual, Japanese publishers stand apart from these problems, although even the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 proved bittersweet, as while it became the fast-selling console of all-time its initial line-up of games has been full of mild disappointments and somehow combined Nintendo sales in November managed to be less than last year in the US, which recorded its worst month since records began 30 years ago.
That’s in large part because of rising costs and tariffs, which in terms of hardware is not any publisher’s fault, but it all paints a depressing picture of an industry that seems even more rudderless and lacking in leadership than ever.
Sony has fared comparatively well this year, but they’ve done that by basically sitting back and letting others make even more mistakes than them – which has been their unhelpful, if admittedly successful, policy for the last several years.
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No one at any of the big publishers has even tried to address the problems surrounding the prohibitive cost of making modern triple-A games, or the untenable amount of time it takes, and before you hope that at least things can’t get any worse we haven’t yet seen what abominations are going to be put forward when publishers start using generative AI in undiluted form.
If everything was up to traditional publishers, we’d conclude there was no hope at all for the future. They don’t seem to care about any of the problems, and they certainly have no solutions for them – their only concerns being to placate their shareholders and upper management.
How the video games industry can save itself
But there is hope, just not from the sort of companies that like to pretend they’re the stewards of the games industry. As our Top 20 of 2025 has made clear, almost everything good that has happened this year has come from indie developers. From the quality of the games to their low prices, indie publishers and developers are doing everything that the bigger companies are not.
You may be sick of hearing about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 by now (to be fair, there have been dozens of other important indie hits this year) but it offers a very clear path out of the rubble of the old games industry. It was made by a core of just 30 talented people, on a budget of less than $10 million, with the majority of development taking place over just a three-year period.
As a reminder, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 cost over $300 million and sold 11 million copies in two years. Expedition 33 has sold over 6 million copies in less than one year, while also now holding the record for the most wins ever at The Game Awards.
And it’s not just Expedition 33. Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Ball x Pit, Blue Prince, Dispatch, and Arc Raiders have all been massive hits, especially relative to their budgets. And almost of them are single-player games too, the type of game that research shows is what people actually want – but which traditional publishers still refuse to make, as they continue to chase the live service game at the end of the rainbow.
We are very sceptical that any of the big publishers will learn anything from this. They should but history suggests that for them the approach will continue to be all or nothing. If they can’t make the biggest, most continually profitable game in the world they’d rather just turn to dust – which is exactly what’s happening right now.
The most positive thing about 2025 is not just the illumination of an alternative direction for the industry but the proof that no one – not developers or gamers – need the old, destructive publishers anymore; companies whose passing will be met with considerably less grief now that the full extent of their greed and incompetence has been made clear.
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