Another year is behind us, and as always it’s time to take a look back at some of the best and worst things that happened in the video game industry in 2024. Naturally, as seems to be the case every year, filling in the losers list is easy, as there’s never a shortage of options for that category, while the winners list takes a lot longer to come together. Still, even if it may at times seem that we only ever hear bad news when it comes to video games, there are still quite a lot of positives to take from this year as well. So, let’s get to them first.
The Winners
Game Companies Raising Starting Salaries
The video game industry has been bleeding people for a long time now, and never more severely than in 2024. Holding on to the skill and experience of the workers who are responsible for creating the games we play is vital to the future of video games, and fortunately amidst the seemingly endless layoffs there are companies that are also still trying to improve their working conditions. For example, Capcom decided to raise its starting salaries by almost 28% earlier this year, saying in a statement that ”with this increase in starting salary, Capcom is pursuing further investment in human capital and the acquisition of exceptional talent.”
Investing in people with the skills and knowledge to create the products that you need to make in order to thrive? What a novel concept. Capcom also paid a one-time bonus to its existing employees, and is raising current salaries within the company by an average of 5% during the 2024 fiscal year. Another developer that has done a similar thing is FromSoftware, which announced in early October that it will also be raising basic salaries by around 12% starting next April.
Tango Gameworks Revived
In a story that we’ll talk about in much more detail a bit later on in this article, earlier this year Microsoft decided to shut down Tango Gameworks – the studio behind Hi-Fi Rush, one of the biggest surprise hits of recent years – to the bafflement of just about everyone. Fortunately, unlike so many others stories of studio closures, this one actually had a happy ending, when the South Korean publisher Krafton announced it had acquired the studio and welcomed all of its employees back to resume work at the developer. Krafton also acquired the rights to the Hi-Fi Rush IP, which it plans to expand on with future projects. Sometimes nice things do happen in this industry.
Unionization Continues in the Video Game Industry
To say that workers’ rights in the video game industry are somewhat lacking would be to put it lightly, so to see in recent years that the increased efforts to unionize within it have begun to take shape is a very good thing for the overall health of the industry. This is especially true considering the absolutely massive amounts of layoffs that have taken place within the last two years.
Notable examples of new unions formed in 2024 include an Activision QA testers union (formed in March), a video game workers’ union at Zenimax (formed in early December), and others founded within companies such as Blizzard and Bethesda. The simple fact is that the video game industry has been, and continues to be, an awful place to work in for a lot of people, so any and all ways to make it a more humane environment for people to make a living in are welcome.
Baldur’s Gate III Director Calls Out the Video Game Industry
In an industry all-too often focused on profits at the expense of everything else, it’s nice to occasionally hear some more human perspectives from those in charge of game companies. One such individual is Swen Vincke, who has repeatedly talked about the layoffs within the video game industry, and essentially called them a failure of management that shows a lack of planning and foresight.
At the Game Developer’s Choice Awards in March he called out the shortsightedness of publishers, saying “It’s always the quarterly profits. The only thing that matters is the numbers. Then you fire everybody, and then next year you’re gonna say ‘Shit! I’m out of developers!’ and you’re gonna start hiring people again,” which according to Vincke just starts the same cycle again. He then continued, stating: “Slow down a little bit. Slow down on the greed. Be resilient, take care of the people, don’t lose the institutional knowledge that’s been built up in all of those people that you lose every single time… because it really pisses me off.”
He then doubled down on his opinion at The Game Awards when he was presenting the award for Game of the Year. Vincke said of the winning game, Astro Bot:
”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.”
Smaller AAA Games Making a Comeback
One very positive development over the last 12 months has been the slow resurgence of smaller scale AAA games from big publishers. As much as I do very much enjoy huge games with massive worlds that feature enough content to fill over a hundred hours of playtime, I’m equally glad that we also get to see games like Astro Bot, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle get given the spotlight. For quite a while it’s felt like one of the most important distinctions for a game has been the number of hours it takes to complete it, rather than the actual quality of those hours, so seeing even bigger publishers embrace these smaller scale titles is a very welcome change.
The Losers
Record Layoffs in the Video Game Industry
This is a tale seemingly without end, as layoffs in the video game industry reached new heights in 2024. 2023 was already the worst year in history for layoffs in the video game industry, and 2024 has outdone it by a considerable margin. In January alone over 6,000 video game workers lost their jobs, and by some estimates at least 14,000 people had lost their jobs by mid-November. In Europe alone around 21% of video game industry workers have lost their jobs due to layoffs in 2024.
The video game industry is bleeding talent and experience, and while many of those laid off will find new jobs within it, there are bound to be a significant portion of those fired who will simply leave the industry and take their skills elsewhere. This is to say nothing of the quite possibly hundreds of different video game projects that have been cancelled as a result of these thousands of studio shutdowns and layoffs.
In the end, the short term effect of all these people losing their jobs is more personal, but in the long term it will also impact the industry as a whole, as not only are there less skilled workers around to make games, but there is also going to be an inevitable drop in the number of new releases over the next several years as those cancelled projects will have left gaps that cannot be filled by new projects that quickly.
But hey, if you were indeed laid off in 2024, don’t worry. You can just find a cheap place to live and spend a year at the beach, at least if former Sony executive Chris Deering is to be believed. It’s good that none of the people laid off have things like families, mortgages, student debt, or anything else to worry about so they can just go ahead and take a year off.
Life Service Failure
The live service space has become massively overcrowded over the last five years, to the point that very few new titles can hope to make even a minor impression. It doesn’t help that the vast majority of those newcomers are basically just copying existing successful games without doing anything unique to stand out, meaning there’s no reason to even bother with them because the same kind of game already exists with much more content and an existing userbase.
Yet, studios and publishers keep on trying to strike gold because the hypothetical profits a successful title can reach go far beyond just about any other type of game these days, and also because every once in a while one of them does become a hit. That then goes on to encourage even more companies to try and shove yet another knock-off live service title into the bursting scene in the vain hope that it might be one of the lucky few to strike a chord with the audience, not realizing that the guitar has long since lost its strings and is missing half of the frets.
The Tiresome Woke/DEI Discourse
Woke really just means nothing at this point, it’s basically become shorthand for ”the thing I don’t like and want an excuse to critisize”. The rise of complaints about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) also feel like people just discovered a shiny new term they can blame everything on without really giving it any more thought beyond the most surface level consideration. Whether it’s the whining about female characters as protagonists, getting angry that a character in a video game isn’t attractive enough, or just being unable to accept the fact that LGBTQ+ people actually exist and even work on video games, the whole discourse has devolved into meaningless nonsense being spew by people looking for things to hate and blame because they don’t cater exclusively to them.
Over the last 12 months this has become increasingly more divisive. The Ghost of Yotei announcement instantly created ”controversy” for daring to have a female protagonist, the recent reveal of Naughty Dog’s newest title Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet attracting a similarly over the top response from a certain section of the audience, and let us not forget the Lara Croft redesign that was shown in early 2024, which had some people saying she now looks like a man, which makes me wonder if such critics have ever seen a woman before.
Then there’s Concord, a dated and derivative hero shooter with a failed marketing campaign trying to force its way into an overcrowded market on the strength of a massively inflated budget. Naturally, some people painted the failure as another ”woke” game crashing and burning, though considering nobody really liked the game regardless of personal beliefs I find that explanation quite unlikely. One character does use they/them pronouns, so I guess that’s enough to make such claims. All this ever did was bury any meaningful criticism and discussion under a mountain of meaningless drivel.
On the other end of this silly argument, some people decided to champion Black Myth: Wukong as their rallying point for ”anti-woke” rhetoric. The game itself is, by most accounts, a very good action RPG and has clearly done very well for itself both critically and commercially, but a lot of the talk around it has sadly been mired in this woke vs. anti-woke debate, with some holding it up as a shining example of an anti-woke game. Underneath it all, the game itself has become lost and seemingly forgotten. I genuinely cannot tell you anything about the game beyond some surface level details, and yet I’ve heard more than I ever needed to know about the various stories surrounding the game’s developer and fanbase.
I could go on listing examples, from Dragon Age: The Veilguard to the recent The Witcher announcement, but at this point it would just be repeating the same silly complaints over and over again. I’d love for everyone to move on from this in 2025, but that’s far too much to ask for.
Microsoft Closing Successful Studios
This is more or less just a continuation of the layoff section, but I had to make a special mention of Microsoft for basically shunting a number of studios that had created numerous very successful titles, in some cases within the last 12 months no less. One of the victims, Arkane Austin, was shut down after its most recent game, Redfall, failed hard both critically and commercially, regardless of what the studio had done previously or how successful it had been. At least in that case there was some kind of valid excuse, even if it’s just another example of the chronic short-sightedness that plagues the mainstream video game industry.
The one truly baffling decision was shutting down Tango Gameworks, a studio that had released one of the previous year’s most beloved new titles (Hi-Fi Rush), before being unceremoniously closed without any clear reason. Then barely a day after the decision to close the studios was made public, Matt Booty, the head of Xbox Game Studios, held a town hall meeting with employees where he stated that ”we need smaller games that give us prestige and awards.” I wonder where they could get those?
Elon Musk Says He’ll Save Video Games, With AI
Elon Musk, a man with net worth somewhere around $320 billion and who owns companies like X, Tesla, and SpaceX, has said that too many video games are owned by giant corporations, so to remedy this problem his giant corporation is going to start a video game development studio to, and I quote, ”make games great again”. While this may sound like a cheap parody of Musk’s usual antics, or a satirical piece of news concocted because of his involvement with the Trump presidency, it’s sadly very real. Oh, and he’s apparently going to accomplish this task by using A.I, because of course he is.
If nothing else, it takes some impressive mental disconnect to say that the solution to the problem of big corporations controlling everything is another big corporation. Either that or Musk thinks his audience are idiots who won’t notice the obvious issue at play. Whether anything actually comes of this is yet to be seen, but his statements are still excessively ridiculous no matter what the end result is.
The Rest
A Game’s Release and Closure Announced Simultaneously
This one is mostly just funny rather than either great or horrible, but the story does kind of speak to the state of the video game industry in general. In January 2024, the admittedly niche rhythm action-adventure game Love Live! School Idol Festival 2 MIRACLE LIVE!’s global release was announced for February. In that very same Tweet the developer then went on to regretfully announce that this global version will end service on May 31, 2024, giving players a grand total of about four months of playtime, and prompting many to ask the question: what exactly was the point of this whole thing? I know a lot of games have seen their service end quite soon after launch, but I think this is the first and so far only time that a game’s launch and impending shut-down were announced at the same time in the same social media post. Points for efficiency I guess.
And that’s it for another year. As always, I obviously can’t list every good and bad thing that happened in the video industry over the last year in a single article, so with that in mind, what were your winners and losers for 2024 in the world of video games? Who did well and who failed? Share them below in the comments.
Full Article – https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463489/2024-in-review-winners-and-losers/