Wow! Another year down. It feels like 2024 went by in a flash, and also feels like I spent half my life slowly trudging through this mostly awful year filled with a lot of bad news.
I mean, can you believe Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launched in the same year that Sonic The Hedgehog 3 hit theaters just in time for Christmas? That seems wrong, but I checked and its accurate!
Last year, we picked 11 horrible gaming disappointments. But this year, in 2024, we had to expand the list to 15. And we cut stuff from this list! What a bad, horrible year, huh? Anyway, here’s some of the worst, most awful, or just plain annoying gaming-related news from the past 12 months. Hopefully 2025 is better.
When the more powerful PlayStation 5 Pro was announced in September, it sparked a lot of controversy. Its $700 price point, and the reality of how much (or little) it would actually improve games, were the two big points of contenti0n. Still, if it did make most games look and run better, Sony would be able to mostly come away victorious.
Alas, that’s not been the case. While a lot of games do look better, there have also been games, like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Alan Wake II, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, that looked worse after receiving fancy PS5 Pro patches. Some of this has been fixed already, but it does seem like devs are still figuring out how to use the Pro’s upscaling tech, and that’s leading to some of these issues. Hopefully, in a few months, we won’t see games looking worse on PS5 Pro. That doesn’t change that all of this has soured any potential excitement around the prospect of the Pro, and probably damaged the console’s already shaky public image forever.
Generally, when something feels too good to be true, it’s because it isn’t going to last for much longer. That was very much the feeling around Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, which made the launch of the Xbox Series X/S feel like such a great deal. There was this extraordinary library, including day-one releases of Microsoft-published titles, to delve into for just ten bucks a month.
Over the years since, the prices have climbed, albeit at the same time as massive international financial issues were occurring following the covid pandemic. In 2023, Game Pass for console went up to $11, while the Ultimate version that also got you access to PC games went up two dollars to $16.99. Which still felt like a pretty decent deal, and despite talk of the increase coinciding with Microsoft’s outrageous purchase of Activision Blizzard for $69 billion, was actually a slightly below-inflation rise.
But then came 2024. In July, it was revealed that Game Pass Ultimate was going up from $17 to $20, a whopping 18 percent increase, and now massively above inflation. But worse—far worse—Microsoft simultaneously killed off the more affordable $11 console-only tier. It was replaced with a new tier called Game Pass Standard, which would no longer include day-one game releases, and was priced at $15! Yup, an almost 50-percent price increase for a far worse version.
What this meant, really, is that the price of Game Pass—for anyone who was using it as a means to access the full library and play the day-one Microsoft games—went from $11 to $20 a month. And this time, with the $69 billion Activision Blizzard deal having somehow gone through, it really did feel like it was a factor.
In 2024, Game Pass went from one of life’s great deals to one to somewhat resent, now a whopping $240 a year, with no discounted annual pricing. Which royally sucks. – John Walker
At the end of 2023, Rockstar Games ended a decade of waiting and released the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6. It quickly racked up millions of views and was pulled apart by every GTA YouTuber and outlet for as many details as possible. Now, it’s a year later and uh…well, Rockstar is radio silent on GTA 6.
Since December 2023, Rockstar has not released a single screenshot or teaser about its big 2025 GTA sequel. Nothing! Fans held out hope that a new trailer would arrive at The Game Awards, but that was always unlikely as Rockstar rarely attends shows like that to show off its upcoming games.
So, we enter 2025 with no new trailer. Now the question for 2025 is: When does GTA 6‘s trailer arrive, and will Rockstar’s big sequel make it out this year or get delayed like nearly every other one of its past games?
It might seem odd to include the shutting down of a 12-year-old mobile game on a list like this, but as the last new Simpsons game released in over a decade, losing Simpsons Tapped Out is really sad.
I started playing Tapped Out back when in launched in 2012. At that time, my future wasn’t looking great and my situation wasn’t stable. But I had a cheap tablet and Simpsons Tapped Out was free. And for years, I would periodically return to it for holiday events, or when I just wanted to check in on my version of Springfield.
But after January 24, 2025, I won’t be able to do that anymore. It likely won’t hit me until later in the year when I go to check on Tapped Out during Halloween and remember that it no longer exists.
Not every game gets to be a hit, but what happened to Concord is still wild to look back on. Sony put out a hero shooter for $40 in a crowded genre mostly occupied by free-to-play games, was surprised when it didn’t immediately grab an audience, and instead of pivoting it to free-to-play or anything else that could have worked in the game’s favor, it chose the nuclear option of pulling it from stores and closing down the studio that worked on it.
All of this happened within the span of two months. Concord launched on August 23, had the plug pulled two weeks later on September 6, and developer Firewalk Studios was shut down on October 9.
What happened to Concord is a speedrun demonstration of how the biggest companies in the industry view the games they put out and the people who make them. Sony made a series of bad calls, and the people who suffered for it were the ones who were doing exactly what they were told to do. It seems the people who make the bad calls are never the ones who have to answer for it. – Kenneth Shepard
At this point, it’s almost silly that Nintendo just hasn’t revealed the Switch 2 already. Every few weeks a new leak happens, revealing more about the console and what it will look like or be capable of doing. And yet, Nintendo didn’t officially reveal its Switch successor during 2024.
It’s almost certain that Nintendo will reveal the Switch 2 or whatever it’s called in early 2025. And that will be nice because I’m getting tired of “insiders” and leakers guessing its reveal date or sharing more possibly true details about the machine. Just announce it already, confirm a new 3D Mario game and make everyone really happy.
Pre-ordering games is, by objective fact, an inherently bad idea. It’s paying for something before it exists, and before there’s any information on whether it was worth existing in the first place. In 2023, pre-ordering somehow got even worse and more pricey. Now people could pay more than the standard price to play a new game a few days early. In 2024, we saw the continued deployment of this miserable tactic, one that Valve and other stores now call advanced access.
Of course, as Zack Zwiezen observed at the beginning of all this, it’s not advanced access, but a delayed release. The game’s finished! You know that, because it’s being sold to people who paid more for it before any reviews could warn them not to. It’s just being artificially held back for everyone else who wasn’t willing to pay more than the full price for a game that wasn’t done yet.
And yet, as with everything dreadful in video games (DRM, online-only single-player games, no ability to re-sell online purchases), we protest them in their infancy, and then just get used to them, like frogs in ever-more revolting boiling water. It’s now become the absolute norm that if you’re willing to fork out tens of dollars more for a game, you can be among the people to play it three days before everyone else. For…kudos? Playground fame? YouTube hits? It’s such a revoltingly cynical exploitation of FOMO.
Pre-orders have gone from offering a cheaper price in return for the risk of buying something that might not be worth getting, to a way to pay far more for something that might not be worth getting, for the reward of getting to find that out a few days early. That’s bad, people. That’s bad. – John Walker
Funko Fusion is a soulless, empty, broken, and sad video game that has nearly zero redeeming qualities. Sure, plenty of other games are filled with cameos and crossover characters, but at least many of those games—like Fortnite—offer something worthy in exchange for trudging through all the brands. Fun game modes, exciting updates, content creation tools, etc. Funko Fusion, on the other hand, boldly offers a shitty game that also includes KFC ads.
I can’t believe I got excited about Half-Life 3 showing up at The Game Awards. Reporting, rumors, and datamining all seem to indicate that, yes, Valve is indeed developing a new Half-Life game that is probably the next main entry in the franchise. And we know Valve owes Geoff a trailer after failing to get Half-Life: Alyx ready for a past Game Awards reveal. So it made sense. Maybe, just maybe, Valve would finally end my suffering and confirm Half-Life 3 and even give us a teaser.
Nope! Didn’t happen. I’m sad, but as a longtime Half-Life fan, I’m used to this feeling. And honestly, I should have known better.
The video game industry was in dire straits in 2024. Over 14,600 people who make video games lost their jobs in the past 12 months. Things have become so bad that Geoff Keighley, the king of saying how good a year it’s been for video games even if it hasn’t been, had to acknowledge them on stage at The Game Awards.
The truth is, every year is a good year for video games themselves, but as corporate greed and poor business decisions become more and more prevalent every year, the people who make the games we celebrate have suffered. As more institutional knowledge is lost to senseless job cuts, the games are going to suffer, too. It doesn’t have to be this way, but so long as corporate greed takes precedence over talent, this is the result. – Kenneth Shepard
I like Borderlands! I like the games a lot! In fact, I even think the games contain well-written characters and stories, they’re just buried under bad jokes and a lot of shooting. So I was somewhat excited about a Borderlands movie. But then it came out and, well…it fucking sucked. At least Borerlands 4 looks good!
2024 gave us more and more signs that physical media’s presence is dwindling. In 2024 we saw reports that retailers didn’t want to carry physical Xbox games. We also got confirmation from Best Buy that it was done selling some DVDs and Blu-Rays in its retail stores. It was also confirmed that Target was cutting back on the number of DVDs it carries in stores.
Now, both retailers did pledge to keep selling physical games for now. But considering how popular the all-digital Xbox Series S is, and how big a chunk of the industry’s sales digital games make up in 2024, it’s not unlikely that in the near future, retailers won’t stock physical games anymore.
Luckily, we can still buy stuff digitally and that’s much more reliable! I mean, digital stores don’t just shut down or anything, right? Let’s move onto the next slide…
…Oh well, damn, I guess digital stores do shut down. Yeah, in July 2024, Microsoft pulled the plug on the Xbox 360 marketplace and, in the process, made it harder than ever to buy and play some Xbox 360-exclusive games.
Sure, some Xbox 360 games are available to buy and play on Xbox One and Series X/S consoles, and you can still download games you own, but it’s really depressing to watch hundreds of games just get blipped out of existence like that.
If companies want us to invest money into buying digital games and movies instead of physical ones, then more laws and rules will be needed to stop places from just shutting the servers down the moment it becomes financially beneficial. Otherwise, a lot more people are going to start sailing the digital seas to find and secure the movies and games they love.
Games media has been through the wringer this year, and one of the most tragic examples of this was the death of Game Informer.
GameStop, historically known for being unable to run a business, officially closed down the world’s longest-running print video game magazine back in August. If uprooting the lives of its workers wasn’t bad enough, the company also took down the official website, wiping decades of video game coverage from the internet in mere seconds. Going to the Game Informer site now takes you to a statement not written by anyone who worked at Game Informer lamenting the closure of one of games media’s institutions, as if this wasn’t an entirely avoidable tragedy. -Kenneth Shepard
Overwatch hasn’t caught a break in a hot minute, but I didn’t expect it to get demonstrably worse in 2024. In the past year, Blizzard has only broken more promises after reportedly canceling the sequel’s story missions, which were ostensibly the whole reason Blizzard made a sequel to the hero shooter in the first place.
It wasn’t all bad. Blizzard made an effort to fix some problems, no longer putting any heroes behind a paywall, but Overwatch 2 has just not panned out the way it was pitched. Here’s hoping 2025 shows the studio righting the ship. -Kenneth Shepard
