For the world of video games, 2025 was more about what didn’t happen than what did. It was supposed to be the year in which the blockbuster of all blockbusters, Grand Theft Auto VI, arrived to sweep all before it, but GTA VI has now been definitively (so Rockstar Games assures us) delayed until 19th November, 2026.
In light of that, 2025 will go down as a decent if unspectacular year for video game design – but some interesting trends and talking points emerged over the last twelve months, many of which may get overlooked at tonight's The Game Awards.
01. AA games to the fore
So-called AA games – with significantly smaller budgets than the AAAs churned out by the big publishers – conspicuously received the majority of the plaudits from those with an interest in games design in 2025. Especially Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, from French developer Sandfall Games and publisher Kepler Interactive, and Hollow Knight: Silksong, made by tiny Australian indie Team Cherry. Honourable mentions are also due for Rebellion’s Atomfall and Supergiant Games’ Hades II. All those games boasted strong, distinctive art direction and the sort of personality and quirkiness that the big publishers seemed unable to deliver.
02. Is VR dying a death? (Again)
Next year will mark ten years since the current wave of VR was first hyped as the next big thing in game design, not to mention the future of our everyday lives. But just as the much-touted metaverse has failed to take off, that vaunted, hardware-shifting killer VR game has also stubbornly failed to appear.
We had some good VR games in 2025, such as Alien: Rogue Incursion, that brought the industrial-futurism of the films to life, while Midnight Walk's hand-made claymation style felt original and demanded attention.
So, while there are some fun and innovative VR games out there, there’s also a sense that unless VR headsets become drastically less uncomfortable and restrictive, and more affordable, VR will never achieve the mainstream heights once ascribed to it. And after a decade, is its crunch time approaching?
03. Are annual franchises flagging?
The games industry’s biggest money-makers are its annual franchises, churned out regularly by the mega-publishers. But are they finally starting to show signs of flagging?
EA Sports’ FC 26 arrived with something of a mea culpa – a raft of changes touted as a response to fan criticism of FC 25. Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will probably snatch the coveted Christmas number one sales spot, but received a lukewarm welcome, with its (admittedly praised) Warzone element under pressure from an unheralded newcomer, ARC Raiders. And it was a disastrous year for perennial so-called live service games, with Sony cancelling Concord mere weeks after a disastrous launch, along with seven other live-service games purportedly under development.
04. AI rules, but is slop on the way?
In both video games and the wider world, 2025 was indisputably the year of AI. And in the games world, familiar fears of AI replacing the likes of voice-artists, character artists and dialogue writers were voiced – perhaps fallaciously, since videogames have embraced AI since the mid-1990s.
AI has already been used to ease and speed up game development, via techniques like procedural generation, and generative AI was used by the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and ARC Raiders. But gamers are vigilantly looking out for so-called AI slop – which some less-scrutinised mobile games have been criticised for – and will cry foul if that creeps into console and PC games.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 couldn't escape accusations of AI use, while on the flipside, Ubisoft revealed its new game, Teammates, is built around the use of gen AI. Likewise, EA and Krafton have invested heavily in gen AI workflows. AI in video games doesn't look like stalling, but it leaves room for non-AI, human-made games to succeed in a heavily vigilant market.
05. Nostalgia has never been more on-trend
2025 was a great year for remakes and remasters of old games – classics like the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, Resident Evils 2 and 4, Broken Sword, the Dragon Quest games and The Elder Scrolls Oblivion received the modern-tech remake treatment, and the final instalment of Square Enix’s brilliant reimagining of Final Fantasy VII will arrive in 2026.
Even Clair Obscur had retro-style turn-based gameplay, and solo-developer games (inevitably with retro-adjacent graphics) like Citizen Sleeper 2 and Quantum Witch created a stir. Redesigned hardware from Evercade and the brilliant Sinclair GamerCard helped make retro gaming more accessible, and the year is ending how it began, with the release of Terminator 2D: No Fate proving one of 2025's most hyped games.
06. Indies trump majors for creativity
In 2025, gamers felt the most creative games came from indie, rather than major publishers. All the AA-games covered above were published by indies, and the likes of horror games Look Outside and No, I’m Not A Human, plus Ball x Pit and Blue Prince, were showered with praise for innovating. The list really is a good one for 2025: Skate Story, The Drifter, Rematch, Lushfoil Photography Sim, as well as the upcoming Will: Follow the Light.
The best games from majors – Avowed, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Battlefield 6, Split Fiction, Death Stranding 2, Borderlands 4 and Assassin’s Creed Shadows – overwhelmingly had a whiff of “seen it all before” to them. And when Electronic Arts became the subject of a leveraged private equity buyout, it had to counter accusations that it would lose interest in its non-annual franchises like Mass Effect.
07. Nintendo does its own thing brilliantly, as ever
The successful arrival of the Switch 2 demonstrated that Nintendo, while a major pillar of the games industry, still operates in its own unique way. The Switch 2 remains pricey and conceptually near-identical to its predecessor.
However, I suspect that next year will see it really come into its own, when first-party titles are added to supplement Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, and the recently released Metroid Prime 4, and crucially, it finally allows Nintendo-heads to play cross-platform blockbusters that were previously the sole province of Sony or Microsoft consoles.
08. Industry layoffs not done yet
The rash of games industry layoffs that started in 2022 tailed off somewhat in 2025 but, to the dismay of all, by no means ended. Studios owned by the likes of Ubisoft, Amazon Games, 2K Games, Funcom and Square Enix were either shuttered or had their workforces slashed, albeit with most layoffs occurring in the US.
Over-capacity after the world took to gaming during the Covid lockdown and overestimation of the appeal of live-service games caused that particular trend, but the industry hopes it’s finally approaching its endgame.
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