We’ve seen some incredible videogames appear in 2023, some absolutely horrendous job losses, and some plain weird news, too. We take a look back…
Nintendo couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, but one of the features in Super Mario Wonder – in which the world goes all topsy-turvy after the player collects a psychotropic flower – perfectly sums up 2023. It’s been a great for games, certainly, but it’s also been a distinctly weird, awful and sometimes confounding year – full of job losses, unexpected disappointments (why, Redfall, why), and as we’ll see, at least one huge unforced error.
As 2023 draws to a close, meanwhile, the gaming landscape looks almost as upside-down and unpredictable as the one Mario trotted through in his latest platformer.
At any rate, let’s get things started with the good stuff first…
The brilliant
Blimey, where do we start? In terms of ruddy brilliant videogames, 2023 has been truly special. A casual glance at Metacritic’s best-reviewed titles provides a snapshot of the past 12 months, with Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom both essentially tied for first place with 96 percent each.
Although they’re very different takes on the fantasy RPG, both games have plenty in common – not least that they’re the product of developers at the peak of their creative powers. It’s likely we’ll still be pootling about in our cobbled-together go-karts in Tears Of The Kingdom well into 2024 and even beyond.
This year’s also been a cracking one for pretty much every other genre you can think of. Resident Evil 4 Remake updated Capcom’s seminal survival horror classic for a new generation; Street Fighter 6 was perhaps the most complete entry in the brawler series so far; Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was a joyous continuation of Insomniac’s superhero action saga; and the above-mentioned Super Mario Wonder was easily Nintendo’s best 2D platformer in years.
There’s been such a crush of incredible games this year that we almost left out Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Starfield, Diablo IV and Alan Wake II. Blimey.
Then there were all the smaller-scale indie games. Sea Of Stars was a sumptuous-looking, top-down RPG that paid homage to 1990s genre offerings like Chrono Trigger, while also throwing its own, modern ideas into the mix. Cassette Beasts was a similarly heartfelt callback to the 1990s era of Pokemon titles. Then there was Cocoon, Limbo and Inside designer Jeppe Carlsen’s inscrutable, enthralling 3D puzzler. Dredge, a one-of-a-kind mix of fishing game and Lovecraftian cosmic horror, was an unexpected treat. El Paso, Everywhere reintroduced players to the John Woo-inspired, slow-motion gunplay of the Max Payne series, all served up with a hint of Tarantino-esque stylistic verve.
Then there was the flawed yet fascinating Viewfinder, Croteam’s engrossing puzzler sequel The Talos Principle 2, and the conceptually ingenious Lemmings-meets-Kafka-meets-cute-dog opus, Humanity. We’d also be remiss not to give a mention to Jusant, Hi-Fi Rush, Pizza Tower, and the superb interactive documentary, The Making Of Karateka.
The awful
It’s a sad irony, then, that while 2023 has seen the release of some wonderful games, it’s been a pretty dreadful year for those who actually work in the industry.
According to statistics published over at GI.biz, over 6,000 people lost their jobs as of October – and the figure is now likely to be much higher given that Timesplitters studio Free Radical announced its closure this month, while Amazon cut 180 jobs at its gaming division.
The number of developers that either cut staff or closed their doors for good in 2023 is almost as long as the list of games mentioned above, in fact. Such companies as Ubisoft, Epic, Unity and CD Projekt Red have collectively made hundreds of employees redundant. Among the other studios we’ve seen shut down in 2023 are Puny Human, Antimatter, and Volition, developer of the Saints Row series.
The reason for all these layoffs and closures? It’s complex, but the rise in interest rates – which had previously been at around zero for almost 15 years – has had a huge impact on the tech sector, with investors shifting their money elsewhere and companies looking to reduce costs and improve profitability. The shift in economic climate has therefore seen previously bullish firms, like Sweden’s Embracer Group, go from aggressive buying sprees of studios to desperate-looking spending cuts – hence the closure of Volition and other studios under the holding company’s umbrella.
This year also saw us wave a sad farewell to E3, the Los Angeles-based convention that has been a fixture in the industry calendar since the mid-1990s. Once the venue for gaming’s biggest announcements, E3’s standing began to falter as studios increasingly made their own online events (like Nintendo Direct), while rival shindigs like Gamescom and The Game Awards also stole its thunder.
The downright weird
When 2023 wasn’t being brilliant or gloomy, it was content to throw rolled-up blobs of oddness at us. Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar acquisition of publisher Activision Blizzard, for example, resulted in months of courtroom drama and increasingly curious news stories.
The Competition and Markets Authority initially blocked Microsoft’s deal in the UK, an Activision Blizzard spokesperson raged that “the UK is clearly closed for business”, while Microsoft responded by hiring Boris Johnson’s partygate lawyer to help appeal the decision.
Meanwhile, in the US, Microsoft’s court battle with the Federal Trade Commission – which also disapproved of the proposed Acti-Blizz purchase – resulted in all sorts of info nuggets coming to light. First, Microsoft argued that it was such a massive loser in the console wars that purchasing one of the biggest publishers in the world wasn’t a threat to anyone.
Then there was that odd day when some courthouse administrator used an iffy marker pen to redact some internal documents, which resulted in previously top-secret information being uploaded to the internet. Thanks to this admin snafu, the world learned that The Last Of Us Part II had a budget of $220m, and that around a million PlayStation owners play Call Of Duty and literally nothing else.
Other documents uploaded to the court’s website revealed that Microsoft’s Phil Spencer had designs on buying Nintendo, and that Sony wouldn’t ‘risk’ sharing information about the PlayStation 6 with Activision Blizzard if it were owned by Microsoft. The documents were all hastily removed from the web, but by then, the news had already been greedily snapped up.
The whole saga had a happy ending eventually, though – at least if you’re Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick. He walked away from the deal, which was finally completed in October, with a reported payday of £375m.
In other weird 2023 news, game engine company Unity managed to upset hundreds, if not thousands of developers when it suddenly unveiled a new pricing system. Called the Runtime Fee, the policy would have seen studios using Unity as their platform of choice faced with potentially huge costs once their game had been downloaded a certain number of times. The lack of clarity surrounding the fees caused many to wonder whether developers could end up having to pay Unity considerable sums of money if their free Steam demo had been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
The response from developers was so loud, and so angry, that Unity was forced to apologise and drastically revise its approach to the policy. Less than three weeks after the Runtime Fee was announced, CEO John Riccitiello stepped down. Even by Riccitiello’s own standards (he once called his own customers “fucking idiots”), it was a quite spectacular unforced error.
All of this is nothing – nothing! – compared to the long and strange story of survival shooter The Day Before, however, which reached its dramatic season finale only a few weeks ago. First announced in 2021, the zombie apocalypse game almost looked too good to be true, with its triple-A quality visuals and seemingly huge range of mechanics making it look more like something we’d expect from Ubisoft than a tiny, largely unknown studio seemingly based in Russia.
After repeated delays and a head-scratching copyright dispute over its name which saw it delisted from Steam for a time, The Day Before finally launched on the 7th December. As it turned out, it wasn’t just disappointing, but also very little like the game previously advertised, and players fled in droves. Developer Fntastic denied accusations that the whole project was a scam, while at the same time deleting old trailers from the web and then suddenly announcing that both it and the game were to shut down with immediate effect.
In the aftermath, former staff at Fntastic claimed that The Day Before was never the open-world survival MMO it was described as pre-launch – “It was always a third-person shooter with some co-op mechanics,” a developer told DualShockers.
Why the studio decided to market the game as something it wasn’t is a mystery. Nor is it clear whether the whole project was some sort of elaborate ruse or simply the product of a rookie independent studio that had bitten off more than it could chew (Fntastic claims it was the latter). One thing’s for sure: it’s one of the strangest game development stories we’ve seen in years, and we suspect that more details will emerge from the sorry enterprise in the months to come.
The future
As for 2024? It remains to be seen whether the churn of job losses that have blighted this year will continue into the next. Or how the rise of AI will completely change the industry or prove to be just another tech bubble, as the eminent Cory Doctorow suspects. There are plenty of games to look forward to in 2024, though, including Star Wars Outlaws, Hellblade II and – finally! – Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Our guess, however, is that next year won’t come close to matching this one when it comes to the sheer volume of exceptional games.
In 2023, we really were spoiled for choice.
