Well, just wrapped up movie list two days ago, only took one day off. Let's get back to writing lists:
Argument:
Usually it is not a big deal to be enormously late with these 'Best Of' lists. January is largely unimportant on the video game calendar. Everybody's holiday shopping is done, everybody's just getting back from holiday vacations. We should relax in January, it is bad form to blow the world up that early in the year. I mean, how much could possibly happen in a month anyway? 2023 is set in stone, nothing could happen that would make an otherwise very good year in games look like an absolute horror show....
...Oh.
Oh God...
...
Well, 2024 is starting really, really badly. Over 6,000 people have already lost their jobs at the time of writing, meaning we almost certainly will surpass 2023's figure of 10,500 job losses. Which was already very bad, mind you. Then we'll probably lap that figure. The big story of 2023 in video games either A) people really loving the big AAA titles, or B) a slow, depressing trickle of layoffs. In 2024, that trickle has become a flood. The dam has burst. This is the most dramatic contraction in the industry I can remember, possibly ever. It was easy last year to condemn selfish studio execs for short-sighted layoffs to trim the numbers. This is much worse.
Matthew Ball has an extensive and terrifying recap of the state of the video game industry climate on his site. He will do the economics a lot better than I ever could, but the simple reality is that games are not making enough money. Worse, people are not playing enough games. And games are too expensive to make. In general the entire industry grew by about 1% in 2023, which is below the rate of inflation, so actually contracted. The bubble created by the Pandemic giving lots of people a lot of time to play games has popped - while at the same time 2023 was a bumper crop of video games. So a lot of things did not sell. Suddenly investors have become unwilling to loan money to projects, which is going to be back-breaking for smaller indie teams. That is not just because of the changes in interest rates, meaning money suddenly is "no longer free" - the rate on return is just not good. Labor prices are going up, the products are expensive, and suddenly even Spider-Man 2 is barely making even. The big push towards Games as a Service models are hitting the reality that nobody wants to play these, everybody has their Life Game already. There is no room for another Destiny when you already have Destiny at home and even Destiny is fucked.
I guess the silver lining is that the core business of game-making, that singular product that you can sell once and make a profit on, that all still works. And indeed, is probably the safer bet now that so many GAAS experiments have been complete fiascos. I mean, poor Rocksteady might not survive the winter considering how well Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is fairing. Meanwhile, Naughty Dog realized that chasing that dragon would mean the death of their studio as we know it, so they cancelled their multiplayer Last of Us game. Years of blood, sweat, and whatever the third word is in Jason Schreier's book title all go went the drain. But at least maybe someday we'll get a Last of Us 3. We'll never get another Arkham Batman game.
One thing I always do when writing these preamble lists is deplore how few games I actually was able to play in the previous calendar year. I actually played more games in 2023 than 2022 in raw hours, based on my Switch and Steam Year in Review reports. I still never found time for Actual Universal Game of the Year, Baldur's Gate 3, maybe I can fix that in 2024. Also, along the way I did not find time for so many great games, which I will list now: Tchia, Blasphemous 2, Goodbye Volcano High, Venba, Chants of Senaar, Metroid Prime Remastered, Dredge, the Dead Space Remake, Octopath Traveler 2, Dave the Diver, the Resident Evil 4 Remake, Spider-Man 2, Street Fighter 6, Season, A Space for the Unbound, El Paso Elsewhere, and probably many more. A better world would be one where I had time for even like five more of these games. And there just isn't time.
The pandemic was horrible, absolutely horrible. But I will say, it was an opportunity for us to radically rethink our relationship with work, our relationship with labor, and how best we could allocate what are clearly vast and plentiful resources for people. We found time to play in 2020 and 2021. Now we have to go back to the office and suffer commutes and deal with bullshit. Why is it suddenly that we have to work so damn hard now? Suddenly doing more with less for people who do not deserve our effort? A better future would be one where people could play more than just four or five games a year. Or do whatever they wanted. I feel like my job is killing me in 2024, there's a fun 3D Celeste game out on itch.io right now, I'm too busy drowning in paperwork and feeling sorry for myself to get around to playing it. (Oh and writing like 50,000 words on reviews and stuff.) Everybody needs a better deal: both people who make games and people who just play games. Society as a whole saw that better worlds were possible and decided the shareholder's value was more important.
And this seems to be now a major problem for the industry. Nobody has time to play all of this. A casual fan of movies can see the 20 movies they're the most excited about during a year, easily. A video game fan has to work really hard to get through ten games. The competition is so fierce that sometimes I play a game that's fine and I cannot finish it because I'm worried I'm wasting my time, there's something else I should play. And that's unhealthy and it sucks, and I'm worried my relationship with this hobby will get poisoned one day.
I really tried, for example, to play Forespoken, the widely-loathed Luminous Studio game from early last year. I actually enjoyed quite a bit of that game, despite what an easy punching bag it was online. I loved the movement mechanics. It was like a fantasy superhero game instead of the RPG I was expecting, but that was not a bad thing. Then I fell off because the game was good but not great, nothing really pushed me to pick it up again, and there you go, $70 completely wasted. There needs to be space in the industry for things that are mostly okay, if not even slightly bad. You shouldn't have to make a masterpiece to matter, that's a ridiculous standard.
In the end, I sound as unexcited about video games as I probably ever have writing about them. The state of things is bad, even while in truth, the artform has never been better. There are incredible games, games that would be mindblowing just a few years ago. We're so spoiled, impossibly spoiled by quality, that people are feeling "ho hum" about one of the best Zelda games only a few months later. We gotta fix this. I need to be better. I can't solve capitalism and I can't suddenly employ an army of talented people whose dream has been shattered, but I can try to play just for play's own sake.
I need to play Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and enjoy the badness, and not worry about time.
Anyway, this turned out to be a very long preamble, so Review for Game # 10 will be out tomorrow. Then we got nine more to go until GOTY.
The Actual List Part of the List:
10. Jusant
9. Hi-Fi Rush
6. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood
5. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
4. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
3. Inscryption
2. Alan Wake 2
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