2025 is looking increasingly — overwhelmingly — crowded with games.
Which makes sense, as 2024 may be remembered as a weird and uneven year for video games. People who play games are sticking with older, enduringly popular games like Grand Theft Auto 5, Fortnite, Counter-Strike, and Minecraft, just as game developers are reckoning with longer development windows, swelling budgets, and a volatile games industry rattled by layoffs.
That’s not to say that 2024 has been a bad year for video games. Quite the opposite. Fans of the medium have enjoyed great stuff, ranging from AAA scale (Dragon’s Dogma 2, Helldivers 2, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown) to indie-level surprises (Balatro, Pacific Drive, Palworld, and Animal Well). This year’s best games have captured the hearts of millions with their fresh takes on classic genres.
But 2024 will still probably feel like a downer — barring any major, still-to-be-announced releases in the back half of the year — compared to the deluge that’s coming in 2025. Next year alone, Nintendo and Rockstar Games will attempt to repeat the successes of their most popular products of all time: the Nintendo Switch and Grand Theft Auto 5.
A new Nintendo console and the long-awaited release of Grand Theft Auto 6 might be enough on their own to carry a full year for many video game fans. Nintendo is said to be working hard to bolster its library of next-generation games for the “Switch 2,” reportedly delaying its new hardware to ensure that its customers have great software to play next year. In other words, expect a long list of great new Nintendo games in 2025 to land alongside the new console.
As for GTA 6, after racking up 200 million sales of 2013’s GTA 5, it’s safe to say that Rockstar will have a built-in audience expecting a huge, generational shift in play — and that audience will doubtless get dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of playtime.
Here’s what else those big releases will be competing with in 2025:
- Pokémon Legends Z-A, the new Pokémon Legends adventure that will tide fans over until the 10th generation of the franchise
- Monster Hunter Wilds, a massive, open-world leveling-up of Capcom’s growing Monster Hunter franchise
- Sid Meier’s Civilization 7, the next entry in the grand strategy series that die-hards play for thousands of hours
- Fable, the first new Fable game in more than 14 years
- Doom: The Dark Ages, the return of the Doom Slayer and hopefully a slight course-correction for the shooter
- Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, the cinematic Black Panther-versus-Captain America World War II game from Uncharted game designer Amy Hennig’s new studio
- Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, another huge Hideo Kojima-led adventure
- Judas, the successor to BioShock from Ghost Story Games
- 2XKO from Riot Games and Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves from SNK, two major new fighting games
This past week of not-E3 and Summer Game Fest events has seen even more 2025 games announced: Koei Tecmo’s Dynasty Warriors: Origins, Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight, Mixtape, Wuchang Fallen Feathers, Cuffbust, Cairn, and others. They’ll join previously announced games Paralives, Little Nightmares 3, and Slay the Spire 2 in an incredibly crowded year that will only get more crowded.
These games, which could consume hundreds of hours of our spare time, are merely the ones we know about. And they’ll be competing for our attention amid one of the busiest movie release calendars of the past decade — all of which amounts to a very expensive and competitive year for entertainment. There are far worse problems to have.