cormack12
Gold Member
Source: https://archive.is/tP2qi
15 biggest surprises
1. Balatro came out of nowhere
2. We're getting more Elden Ring
3. Indiana Jones is good
4. The year of Shadow the Hedgehog
5. Red Dead Redemption finally got a PC port
6. Got pledging to keep old games runing
7. Zelda game finally had a playable Zelda
8. PS5 retro themes
9. Stalker 2 finally landed
10. The death and revival of Tango Gameworks
11. Astro Bot is wonderful
12. The Fallout TV show was good
13. Publishers ditching their own launchers
14. Xbox brings it games to platforms people actually own
15. Sony brings Horion to Switch
15 biggest disappointments
1. PS5 Pro making games looks worse
2. Game Pass becoming more complicated and expensive
3. No news about GTA VI
4. End of Simpsons 'Tapped Out'
5. Concord flopping and being killed within two weeks
6. No switch 2 announcement
7. Early Access Preorder shit continues
8. Funko Fusion
9. No HL3 at TGA
10. Layoffs continue
11. Borderlands movie tucked
12. Physical media disappearing from stores
13. Xbox 360 digital store shuttered
14. The death of game informer
15. Overwatch 2 got worse
The state of PlayStation
The Hardware
After tons of reporting, rumors, and speculation, 2024 was the year Sony finally launched the PS5 Pro. Its hefty price tag promised no-compromises gaming, with upscaled 4K resolution at 60fps thanks to a more powerful GPU and new machine learning technology called PSSR. The results so far have been good to mixed, with some games looking more gorgeous than ever while certain third-party releases struggle to play nice with PSSR and studios race to amend their PS5 Pro updates in the face of unexpected visual downgrades. This has put the device, at least early on, firmly into the “nice but unnecessary” category of upgrades.
The Software
The PS5 interface received a notable refresh this year in the form of a new customizable welcome hub. The default module when you start up the console comes with new backgrounds and a bunch of tiles that can be swapped in with various widgets, from trophies and controller battery life to news about wishlisted games, console storage, and who’s online. It’s a seemingly small touch that goes a long way toward making the PS5 ecosystem easier to parse, navigate, and engage with, and it might just be the start of a bold new era for the system’s UI.
The Networks and Services
This portion of our annual PlayStation report card usually focuses almost exclusively on the services portion of the equation, but 2024 showcased some significant lapses in network functionality. While it still pales in comparison to the infamous 2011 PSN outage, the services were down intermittently for almost a full day back in the fall. It was a reminder of how much of the platform relies on constant connectivity to deliver on its promise, from multiplayer-only games to always-online single-player campaigns. Any outage, no matter how brief, is also notable in the context of Sony charging $10 a month for the ability to play online.
PlayStation Stars, a smaller rewards initiative incorporated into the PS app rather than the console itself, nevertheless raised questions when it was offline for multiple weeks over the summer with no real explanation from Sony as to why the service had gone down. Coupled with issues with activity cards and various high-profile firmware bugs, the normally quite stable PS5 platform wobbled more than usual in 2024. PS Plus’ Netflix-like library of downloadable games was on much firmer footing, however.
The Games
Sony’s impressive first-party studios mostly took a backseat in 2024 with two important exceptions: Astro Bot and Concord. The first, from Asobo Studio, married the whimsy and creativity Sony’s Japan Studio was once synonymous with to the high bar of quality and production values showcased by the company’s more recent big-budget blockbusters. Astro Bot was announced in May and won best game at The Game Awards 2024 just seven months later. It’s a top-tier action platformer that also shows how the DualSense controller’s haptic gimmicks can transform the feel of otherwise familiar gameplay. Coupled with Lego Horizon Adventures, Sony demonstrated a new family-friendly range outside of the grim, violent prestige games that have defined its brand in years prior.
Concord, meanwhile, was an Icarus moment for Sony’s first-party live service initiative. The hero shooter from Firewalk Studios had a development budget of over $200 million, sources told Kotaku earlier this year, which culminated in a fine but forgettable multiplayer experience which failed to attract players so spectacularly at launch that Sony yanked the plug less than two weeks later with full refunds and a complete server shutdown. The company closed the studio it had purchased only the year prior and promised to incorporate the learnings from the debacle into its ongoing strategy.
The state of Xbox and Game Pass
Activision And Bethesda Save Xbox, But Suffer For It
This was the first year of a new Xbox era. The company now fully owns and operates both Activision/Blizzard/King and Bethesda, alongside the other studios its bought up over the last few years. And thanks to Activision and Bethesda, Microsoft had a solid video game release schedule in 2024.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was one of the year’s biggest games and, because Xbox now completely owns Activision, it arrived on Game Pass on day one. Blizzard released an expansion for Diablo 4, which arrived on Game Pass in early 2024, and made an already good game bigger and better. Bethesda put out its first expansion for Starfield as well as launching Elder Scrolls Castles on mobile and a new expansion for Elder Scrolls Online. And It ended the year with a big Game Pass launch: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, one of the better-reviewed games of 2024. Meanwhile, World of Warcraft got a new expansion, CoD Warzone Mobile arrived on phones, and some old Activision games like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot were added to Game Pass’s library.
Layoffs and closures
In January, Microsoft announced it was laying off around 1,900 employees across Activision, Bethesda, and other Xbox studios. This came just three months after Xbox had formally acquired Activision, and led to the FTC filing a formal complaint. The FTC says that this is exactly the type of thing the agency was worried about when it tried to stop Microsoft from buying Activision.
Then, four months later, Xbox laid off even more people. On May 7, Xbox announced it was closing three Bethesda-owned studios—Tango Gameworks (Hi-Fi Rush), Arkane Austin (Redfall), and Alpha Dog Games (Mighty Doom)—with a fourth support studio, Roundhouse Studios, being absorbed by the team behind Elder Scrolls Online. (There were even more Xbox cuts in September.)
The Enshittification Of Xbox’s Game Pass
Speaking of Game Pass, in 2024 Xbox’s video game subscription service received a lot of new games. Here are just some of the games that arrived on Game Pass day one: Palworld, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, MLB The Show 2024, Harold Halibut, Hellblade 2, Dungeons of Hinterberg, Ara: History Untold, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and Metal Slug Tactics. And besides day-one launches, Game Pass also added older games like the Resident Evil 2 remake, Control, Dead Island 2, and more to its library.
However, Xbox Game Pass isn’t quite the easy-to-recommend deal it was in past years. That’s because in July, Xbox announced big changes to Game Pass. To sum it up: Everyone is paying more for Game Pass, but not everyone gets access to big new games like Call of Duty Black Ops 6 at launch. Not great! For as long as Game Pass has been a thing, the promise of day-one first-party titles like Halo has been its big selling point. But in 2024, seemingly to help cover the cost of spending nearly $70 billion on Activision, Xbox has ruined what was once the best deal in gaming.
Everything Is An Xbox, Including Your PS5 And Switch
I mean, if you look at everything that happened in 2024, it doesn’t paint a good picture for Xbox consoles. Once again, Xbox sales were horrible compared to PlayStation and Nintendo in 2024. Reportedly, some publishers aren’t sure if they’ll continue releasing games on Xbox consoles due the small playerbase.
All of this seems to indicate that Xbox is pulling a Sega and going multiplatform in the future. However, Spencer and others at Xbox keep saying otherwise. “We’ll definitely do more consoles in the future, and other devices,” Spencer told Rolling Stone in November. The Xbox boss also claimed that the company is working on a Steam Deck-like handheld device, too. But that is years away, and could be canned before it ever sees the light of day.
According to Xbox, the future definitely includes new consoles, but you won’t need to buy them because Microsoft’s games will be available via the cloud or ported to other platforms. That sounds less like a confident and well-developed blueprint for the future and more like a messy bundle of promises and individual plans meant to distract us from reality.
The state of Nintendo Switch
The Hardware
What’s left to say about the Nintendo Switch? The promise it offers of gaming on the go or on a big display is as compelling as ever, though its ability to truly deliver a smooth and seamless gaming experience has eroded with time. The difference between how even mid-range to smaller games perform on Switch versus other platforms like PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC has only continued to grow. Framerate hiccups, visual detail, and loading times have all gotten worse, while rival portables like the Steam Deck and Asus Rog Ally offer fewer tradeoffs at a slightly higher price, at least when it comes to third-party ports and indie releases.
I’m not supposed to be spending this section on the state of the current Switch writing about the future one, but it’s a more accurate depiction of what most of 2024 has felt like for current Switch owners: pinning for what’s behind the red curtain as we growing increasingly impatient and frustrated with what’s already in our hands.
The Software
Although the Switch hardware is hanging on by the skin of its teeth, the UI, interface, and general feel of actually navigating the home screen, eShop, and app-only features has grown increasingly grim. It’s sluggish, poorly optimized, and messy. The sleekness of the central row of tiles belies a stark lack of options when it comes to customization or getting any kind of meaningful information about your system, games, or the wider Nintendo ecosystem at a quick glance.
The eShop is a special point of pain. I quietly sigh every time I have to open the store to go and buy a game, check what’s on sale, or try to see what just came out. It feels like it takes a minor marathon for the store to boot up, and then even longer for the actual parts of it to individually load. Finally getting into the shop is just the start of the headaches, with shovelware and cheap rip-offs of famous games crammed throughout the catalog as you scroll. It’s not great, and it doesn’t help that Nintendo has seemed very unresponsive to the legitimate issues with it.
Network & Services
Nintendo Switch Online has continued to expand. A parade of Game Boy Advance classics added throughout 2024 included Golden Sun 1 and 2, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords, and Metroid Zero Mission. Mother 3 even came to the service, though only in Japan.
Switch Online is more valuable than ever, but still lacks the one thing its competitors have going for it: access to a Netflix-like library of new games.
The Games
Nintendo is masterful when it comes to making an off year feel like it’s still full of big games.
The quantity was there in 2024 for sure, but it definitely felt like a second-string year while Nintendo rested its starters. Echoes of Wisdom experimented with really neat and novel ideas but fell just short of greatness. Mario & Luigi: Brothership was a great RPG-lite sequel that didn’t quite manage to truly transform the series the way other Switch games have for their respective franchises. The best game Nintendo put on the Switch in 2024 was arguably Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, a remake of a two-decade-old GameCube game that, in another universe, would have come to the platform without the HD upgrade simply the via Switch Online back catalog.
The Switch’s 2024 library didn’t reach the same heights as it has in past years, but there was still plenty to play, an incredible feat for a console that should have been replaced long ago.
15 biggest surprises
1. Balatro came out of nowhere
2. We're getting more Elden Ring
3. Indiana Jones is good
4. The year of Shadow the Hedgehog
5. Red Dead Redemption finally got a PC port
6. Got pledging to keep old games runing
7. Zelda game finally had a playable Zelda
8. PS5 retro themes
9. Stalker 2 finally landed
10. The death and revival of Tango Gameworks
11. Astro Bot is wonderful
12. The Fallout TV show was good
13. Publishers ditching their own launchers
14. Xbox brings it games to platforms people actually own
15. Sony brings Horion to Switch
15 biggest disappointments
1. PS5 Pro making games looks worse
2. Game Pass becoming more complicated and expensive
3. No news about GTA VI
4. End of Simpsons 'Tapped Out'
5. Concord flopping and being killed within two weeks
6. No switch 2 announcement
7. Early Access Preorder shit continues
8. Funko Fusion
9. No HL3 at TGA
10. Layoffs continue
11. Borderlands movie tucked
12. Physical media disappearing from stores
13. Xbox 360 digital store shuttered
14. The death of game informer
15. Overwatch 2 got worse
The state of PlayStation
The Hardware
After tons of reporting, rumors, and speculation, 2024 was the year Sony finally launched the PS5 Pro. Its hefty price tag promised no-compromises gaming, with upscaled 4K resolution at 60fps thanks to a more powerful GPU and new machine learning technology called PSSR. The results so far have been good to mixed, with some games looking more gorgeous than ever while certain third-party releases struggle to play nice with PSSR and studios race to amend their PS5 Pro updates in the face of unexpected visual downgrades. This has put the device, at least early on, firmly into the “nice but unnecessary” category of upgrades.
The Software
The PS5 interface received a notable refresh this year in the form of a new customizable welcome hub. The default module when you start up the console comes with new backgrounds and a bunch of tiles that can be swapped in with various widgets, from trophies and controller battery life to news about wishlisted games, console storage, and who’s online. It’s a seemingly small touch that goes a long way toward making the PS5 ecosystem easier to parse, navigate, and engage with, and it might just be the start of a bold new era for the system’s UI.
The Networks and Services
This portion of our annual PlayStation report card usually focuses almost exclusively on the services portion of the equation, but 2024 showcased some significant lapses in network functionality. While it still pales in comparison to the infamous 2011 PSN outage, the services were down intermittently for almost a full day back in the fall. It was a reminder of how much of the platform relies on constant connectivity to deliver on its promise, from multiplayer-only games to always-online single-player campaigns. Any outage, no matter how brief, is also notable in the context of Sony charging $10 a month for the ability to play online.
PlayStation Stars, a smaller rewards initiative incorporated into the PS app rather than the console itself, nevertheless raised questions when it was offline for multiple weeks over the summer with no real explanation from Sony as to why the service had gone down. Coupled with issues with activity cards and various high-profile firmware bugs, the normally quite stable PS5 platform wobbled more than usual in 2024. PS Plus’ Netflix-like library of downloadable games was on much firmer footing, however.
The Games
Sony’s impressive first-party studios mostly took a backseat in 2024 with two important exceptions: Astro Bot and Concord. The first, from Asobo Studio, married the whimsy and creativity Sony’s Japan Studio was once synonymous with to the high bar of quality and production values showcased by the company’s more recent big-budget blockbusters. Astro Bot was announced in May and won best game at The Game Awards 2024 just seven months later. It’s a top-tier action platformer that also shows how the DualSense controller’s haptic gimmicks can transform the feel of otherwise familiar gameplay. Coupled with Lego Horizon Adventures, Sony demonstrated a new family-friendly range outside of the grim, violent prestige games that have defined its brand in years prior.
Concord, meanwhile, was an Icarus moment for Sony’s first-party live service initiative. The hero shooter from Firewalk Studios had a development budget of over $200 million, sources told Kotaku earlier this year, which culminated in a fine but forgettable multiplayer experience which failed to attract players so spectacularly at launch that Sony yanked the plug less than two weeks later with full refunds and a complete server shutdown. The company closed the studio it had purchased only the year prior and promised to incorporate the learnings from the debacle into its ongoing strategy.
The state of Xbox and Game Pass
Activision And Bethesda Save Xbox, But Suffer For It
This was the first year of a new Xbox era. The company now fully owns and operates both Activision/Blizzard/King and Bethesda, alongside the other studios its bought up over the last few years. And thanks to Activision and Bethesda, Microsoft had a solid video game release schedule in 2024.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was one of the year’s biggest games and, because Xbox now completely owns Activision, it arrived on Game Pass on day one. Blizzard released an expansion for Diablo 4, which arrived on Game Pass in early 2024, and made an already good game bigger and better. Bethesda put out its first expansion for Starfield as well as launching Elder Scrolls Castles on mobile and a new expansion for Elder Scrolls Online. And It ended the year with a big Game Pass launch: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, one of the better-reviewed games of 2024. Meanwhile, World of Warcraft got a new expansion, CoD Warzone Mobile arrived on phones, and some old Activision games like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot were added to Game Pass’s library.
Layoffs and closures
In January, Microsoft announced it was laying off around 1,900 employees across Activision, Bethesda, and other Xbox studios. This came just three months after Xbox had formally acquired Activision, and led to the FTC filing a formal complaint. The FTC says that this is exactly the type of thing the agency was worried about when it tried to stop Microsoft from buying Activision.
Then, four months later, Xbox laid off even more people. On May 7, Xbox announced it was closing three Bethesda-owned studios—Tango Gameworks (Hi-Fi Rush), Arkane Austin (Redfall), and Alpha Dog Games (Mighty Doom)—with a fourth support studio, Roundhouse Studios, being absorbed by the team behind Elder Scrolls Online. (There were even more Xbox cuts in September.)
The Enshittification Of Xbox’s Game Pass
Speaking of Game Pass, in 2024 Xbox’s video game subscription service received a lot of new games. Here are just some of the games that arrived on Game Pass day one: Palworld, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, MLB The Show 2024, Harold Halibut, Hellblade 2, Dungeons of Hinterberg, Ara: History Untold, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and Metal Slug Tactics. And besides day-one launches, Game Pass also added older games like the Resident Evil 2 remake, Control, Dead Island 2, and more to its library.
However, Xbox Game Pass isn’t quite the easy-to-recommend deal it was in past years. That’s because in July, Xbox announced big changes to Game Pass. To sum it up: Everyone is paying more for Game Pass, but not everyone gets access to big new games like Call of Duty Black Ops 6 at launch. Not great! For as long as Game Pass has been a thing, the promise of day-one first-party titles like Halo has been its big selling point. But in 2024, seemingly to help cover the cost of spending nearly $70 billion on Activision, Xbox has ruined what was once the best deal in gaming.
Everything Is An Xbox, Including Your PS5 And Switch
I mean, if you look at everything that happened in 2024, it doesn’t paint a good picture for Xbox consoles. Once again, Xbox sales were horrible compared to PlayStation and Nintendo in 2024. Reportedly, some publishers aren’t sure if they’ll continue releasing games on Xbox consoles due the small playerbase.
All of this seems to indicate that Xbox is pulling a Sega and going multiplatform in the future. However, Spencer and others at Xbox keep saying otherwise. “We’ll definitely do more consoles in the future, and other devices,” Spencer told Rolling Stone in November. The Xbox boss also claimed that the company is working on a Steam Deck-like handheld device, too. But that is years away, and could be canned before it ever sees the light of day.
According to Xbox, the future definitely includes new consoles, but you won’t need to buy them because Microsoft’s games will be available via the cloud or ported to other platforms. That sounds less like a confident and well-developed blueprint for the future and more like a messy bundle of promises and individual plans meant to distract us from reality.
The state of Nintendo Switch
The Hardware
What’s left to say about the Nintendo Switch? The promise it offers of gaming on the go or on a big display is as compelling as ever, though its ability to truly deliver a smooth and seamless gaming experience has eroded with time. The difference between how even mid-range to smaller games perform on Switch versus other platforms like PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC has only continued to grow. Framerate hiccups, visual detail, and loading times have all gotten worse, while rival portables like the Steam Deck and Asus Rog Ally offer fewer tradeoffs at a slightly higher price, at least when it comes to third-party ports and indie releases.
I’m not supposed to be spending this section on the state of the current Switch writing about the future one, but it’s a more accurate depiction of what most of 2024 has felt like for current Switch owners: pinning for what’s behind the red curtain as we growing increasingly impatient and frustrated with what’s already in our hands.
The Software
Although the Switch hardware is hanging on by the skin of its teeth, the UI, interface, and general feel of actually navigating the home screen, eShop, and app-only features has grown increasingly grim. It’s sluggish, poorly optimized, and messy. The sleekness of the central row of tiles belies a stark lack of options when it comes to customization or getting any kind of meaningful information about your system, games, or the wider Nintendo ecosystem at a quick glance.
The eShop is a special point of pain. I quietly sigh every time I have to open the store to go and buy a game, check what’s on sale, or try to see what just came out. It feels like it takes a minor marathon for the store to boot up, and then even longer for the actual parts of it to individually load. Finally getting into the shop is just the start of the headaches, with shovelware and cheap rip-offs of famous games crammed throughout the catalog as you scroll. It’s not great, and it doesn’t help that Nintendo has seemed very unresponsive to the legitimate issues with it.
Network & Services
Nintendo Switch Online has continued to expand. A parade of Game Boy Advance classics added throughout 2024 included Golden Sun 1 and 2, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords, and Metroid Zero Mission. Mother 3 even came to the service, though only in Japan.
Switch Online is more valuable than ever, but still lacks the one thing its competitors have going for it: access to a Netflix-like library of new games.
The Games
Nintendo is masterful when it comes to making an off year feel like it’s still full of big games.
The quantity was there in 2024 for sure, but it definitely felt like a second-string year while Nintendo rested its starters. Echoes of Wisdom experimented with really neat and novel ideas but fell just short of greatness. Mario & Luigi: Brothership was a great RPG-lite sequel that didn’t quite manage to truly transform the series the way other Switch games have for their respective franchises. The best game Nintendo put on the Switch in 2024 was arguably Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, a remake of a two-decade-old GameCube game that, in another universe, would have come to the platform without the HD upgrade simply the via Switch Online back catalog.
The Switch’s 2024 library didn’t reach the same heights as it has in past years, but there was still plenty to play, an incredible feat for a console that should have been replaced long ago.
