The 10 game industry trends that made (and plagued) this year

Well we made it. Most of us anyway. The sun is setting on 2025 and I have to say each year of the game industry’s ongoing economic contraction has found new fresh ways to torment us (and occasionally delight us. There was SOME good news this year!)

Optimists and pessimists will have plenty to chew on with this year’s most notable trends. The optimists in game development will see an industry in the midst of great change, finally beginning to move past the unrelenting layoffs and studio closures that dogged it since 2022. The old world is dying, the new world is being born, and birth is of course, a painful process.

The cynics may look at the last year and see a far different picture: one of exploitation. Of workers, of players—even of studio heads. The biggest winners of the y…

The cynics may look at the last year and see a far different picture: one of exploitation. Of workers, of players—even of studio heads. The biggest winners of the year were indubitably those who could turn a buck off of the hard work of others: the rent-seekers, the CEOs, the do-nothing YouTubers...it was a banner year for profiting off the pain of others.

Which camp do I fall in? Ah, dear reader, consider that to understand both points of view I am forced to hold both of them in my head. Picture the sound of two sawblades grinding against each other and you’ll understand what it feels like to process the complex state of the video game industry. I often stare at my cats and envy their empty heads with zero thoughts.

It’s not all bad. As always I feel lucky and privileged to have earned your trust and readership even in these tumultuous times. Today editor-in-chief Danielle Riendeau and editorial director Alissa McAloon are assisting me in presenting the most important trends of the year, presented below in no particular order.

Generative AI faced its first market test

We saw some titles in 2024 embrace generative AI, but 2025 was the year we got hard data about how well it’s performing. Thanks to data collated by Totally Human Media’s Ichiro Lambe, we know that games disclosing generative AI use on Steam have grossed about $660 million.

Did this happen because developers solved the ethical and financial downsides of using the technology? Not really. Some games like Hidden Door explored how LLMs can inform new styles of gameplay without burning tons of CO2 and slurping up unethically harvested data. But companies like Embark Studios plowed ahead with features like AI-generated voices in games like Arc Raiders with seemingly little concern about the implications of crushing the voice acting ecosystem for forgettable work.

That said, Arc Raiders also captures the difficult nuance in describing the pros or cons of AI technology. Its machine learning-driven animation and in-game voice changer tech are compelling use cases lumped in with voice lines that could have been performed by a live human.

Elsewhere, Game Developers has heard rumblings of studios using third-party AI tools for additional concept art and voiceover tasks. Ubisoft revealed its AI-driven NPCs are powered by Google Gemini, a surprising reversal for a company that insisted it was using its own proprietary data for AI tooling in 2023.

Looming over all this however is the sound of a creaking AI bubble making the same noises as the Purity Distilling Company’s molasses tank. The costs of AI tools are rising, but revenue isn’t. Meanwhile investments in data centers are beginning to look financially shaky.

Is your studio vulnerable if AI tools in your tech stack collapse in a bubble burst? Maybe we’ll find out in 2026… -Bryant Francis

The "deprofessionalization of games" reared its head

First off I know I helped popularized the word "deprofessionalization." I’M SORRY. Former Game Developer publisher Simon Carless coined it in an interview with Wired. Go bug him about it (and check out the wonderful GameDiscoverCo newsletter).

To solve the game industry’s employment woes we must stare them in the face. The industry’s mass layoffs and ever-lowering floor for learning game development have shifted the industry’s supply and demand dynamics in employment.

Meanwhile, smaller teams produce games that compete with or even beat out industry heavyweights facing rising development costs. And "forever games" soak up player revenue that once might have fueled a larger spread of large companies.

As a result, rank-and-file developers risk losing stability and being shuffled about through a gig economy of creative work, driving down wages and centralizing power in the "true creatives" who can make up "core teams." Suspiciously, many of those "true creatives" are the ones who got us into this mess in the first place.

That is one way that deprofessionalization might manifest. There is another way, one pitched by the likes of Midwest Games CEO Ben Kvalo. Instead of driving devs into a Hollywood-style freelance role, studios could embrace Hollywood-style financing where different smaller companies combine financing and resources to produce ambitious titles.

A case study might exist in Adhoc Studio’s Dispatch, a game made not just by Adhoc but animated by Igloo Studio and rescued from financial doom by tabletop role-playing game powerhouse Critical Role.

This model transfers stable employment not to large companies, but to multiple mid-sized ones that collaborate on projects and blend talent pools. Maybe there’ll be more signs of this in 2026.

All I know for now is we must resist a freelance-focused future for the industry. Freelancing is great. It is not viable for everyone. Games are made by people, and we will lose people if we embrace an unfair, uneven model. -Bryant Francis

Independent games media fought to survive

I won’t belabor what a terrible time this has been for game developers (there’s preaching to the choir and then there’s belting a showtune at the choir). The sad truth is that it’s as bad for what remains of professional game journalism, with several publications shuttering in the last few years, or seeing the injustice of their shambling remains trotted out by increasingly hollow media companies. One of those unhappy endings has occurred at every publication I’ve ever staffed besides this one.

A few phoenixes have risen from the ashes in 2025: in March, legendary game magazine Game Informer relaunched with much of the editorial and video production team coming back onboard after shuttering in August 2024. In May 2025, Polygon was sold off to Valnet, which laid off much of the staff and drove others to to flee the smoldering rubble. Founding editor Brian Crecente gives a stirring account of what happened to the site here.

Those former Polygon employees have founded sites like Rogue, a site owned and run by a number of ex-Polygon staffers, serving up gaming editorial and guides. Just this fall, longtime features editor Matt Leone opened up Design Room, with a whopper of a first story: an in-depth oral history on the creation of The Last Guardian. Former Polygon editor-in-chief Chris Plante also started Post Games, a podcast offering up weekly "NPR-style" interviews with folks from around the ecosystem.

For much more on the current state of worker-owned publications in games, refer to my colleague Chris Kerr’s recent feature on the subject. -Danielle Riendeau

The far-right continued to leech off game developers

Throughout 2025 we documented stories of the far-right using threats and harassment to intimidate developers and frighten companies into canceling challenging games. This trend is not new. 11 years ago they did so wearing a putrid mask of feigned concern over "ethics in game journalism."

Today they need no mask because they are backed by an American government (getting in on the action with some noxious shitposting on official government accounts) willing to punish companies over ideological differences and profit incentives from a bigot-friendly YouTube algorithm and fully Nazi-fied X (formerly Twitter). They are most successful when they can isolate victims and cut off any sign of solidarity.

This is the only way the far-right can influence game development. Their animating instincts crush creativity and punish talent, leaving them chasing the bursts of adrenaline that come with uncovering imaginary conspiracies and toppling perceived foes. The game industry would do well to remember they produce nothing of commercial or artistic value.

Well, almost nothing. Netflix’s Devil May Cry anime, written and produced by Donald Trump fan Adi Shankar, is incredible. Maybe we’d all be happier off if they got off social media and actually made art instead of leeching off the work of creatives. -Bryant Francis

The rise of the "weirdo indie co-op" genre

"Friendslop," which I’m going to pretend is called "friendcore," is a beautiful bouncing baby of a new subgenre, exemplified by joyous examples of friendly co-op/competition in Peak, Lethal Company, and R.E.P.O. The friendcore games did huge numbers this year, and made a huge mark on the collective consciousness of players (not to mention, our own staff Game of the Year list: look out for that shortly).

Our columnist Nicole Carpenter investigated the sub-genre this year, interviewing the fine minds behind games like Peak and the upcoming Voyages of Nera, and noting just how much the appeal here lies on performance, friendly competition/cooperation, and the joy of goofing around with one’s friends.

"‘The core of a friendslop game is where the fun of the game comes from stupid stuff you and your friends do, and a lot of it is driven by the mistakes you make,’ [Aggro Crab art director] Drew said of Peak. ‘It’s a game where you’re all dumb idiots trying to do something difficult and complicated, and failing is the funny part.’" -Danielle Riendeau

Unions stood up

The industry has seen a slow-but-steady uptick in union activity over the last few years—evidenced by SOTI statistics like the fact that over half of developers surveyed want to join a union—and the growing number of union shops across the globe. From SAG-AFTRA’s efforts to secure a fair contract with large studios, to ZeniMax Workers United-CWA QA contract ratification to the announcement of Overwatch’s 200-person union and beyond.

The most recent "big" union news dropped just this week: famed Doom studio id Software has just formed a wall-to-wall shop, the trend towards workers uniting has been a bright spot in very troubled times. -Danielle Riendeau

Kickstarter campaigns fueled more game studios

This one caught me by surprise. As investors turn up their noses at incredible studios and game ideas, developers have returned to Kickstarter to finance games and foster player communities.

This is not the heady days of Kickstarter’s launch, when Double Fine could raise millions of dollars to fund games like Broken Age and (the excellent-but-overlooked) Massive Chalice.

Today’s Kickstarter successes are raising around $200,000 to $500,000 in player-driven fundraising, which is sometimes enough to kick off development, finish it, or act as a strong booster for outside funding.

It’s a lifeline for some studios, but not a panacea for the industry’s funding woes. If nothing else it’s proof-of-life for player demand for small games made by talented studios. The kindling is there. The embers burn hot. Who will approach the fire and risk casting the spark that will reignite our community’s beating heart? -Bryant Francis

The wholesome "gamblification" of games

Following in the footsteps of 2024’s Balatro and its many-jokered card decks, 2025 saw a rise in new titles that pull from the rulesets and mechanics of non-video games, particularly from games in the games-of-chance realm. This year saw a rising dynamic with familiar mechanics, dabbling in familiar languages of play in order to make otherwise complex designs more immediately accessible to would-be players.

Familiarity is at the very core of these kinds of games. Balatro, the spark that lit this fire, uses the ruleset of poker as a starting point before injecting a healthy dose of complexity into the mix bit by bit, and games like Slots and Daggers, Wordplay, A Solitaire Mystery, Cloverpit, or This Ain’t Even Poker Ya Joker have continued to play in this space during 2025.

Building on a familiar foundation allows the game to ramp up rapidly without alienating the player; even as modifiers stack and mechanics are introduced, players have the familiar understanding of building a poker hand to lead them through the chaos.

For developers, this approach offers a nifty design shortcut that leverages pre-existing player knowledge, bypassing the need to tutorialize to instead line players for intuitive experimentation and discovery. However while borrowing from games of chance, the tricky part and responsibility developers take on is ensuring this gamblification of games remains playful and not exploitative. - Alissa McAloon

Tariffs and rising costs: Game Pass(ing) on the cost to customers

Game Pass Ultimate, the top tier of Xbox’ much loved subscription service,jumped up a hefty 50% this year (from $19.99 to $29.99 monthly). The company also hiked prices up on hardware: the Series X went from $600 to $650, and the lowest-end model, a 512gb Series S, went up to $400 from $380. Even Xbox developer kits went up by 33 percent, from $1500 to $2000.

The culprit? The Trump administration tariffs. That is, the company invoked "macroeconomic conditions," for both the service and hardware hikes. The increases happened to coincide with major developments in the Trump Administration’s planned tariffs on countries like China, where Microsoft manufactures its Xbox lineup. -Danielle Riendeau

Studio heads got candid about funding woes

You’ll usually hear executives and studio heads talking big about successes and industry trends. But this year a number of them have attracted industry attention by being transparent about the funding failures that doomed their companies.

Popular commentators include Fantastic Pixel founder Greg Street, T-Minus Zero Entertainment founder Seth Vogel, and Frost Giant Studio CEO Tim Morten. All suffered major defeats in 2025, all have chosen to speak publicly about them instead of keeping their struggles close to the chest. Others have brought that transparency to journalists, letting us be part of these challenging conversations.

Is there anything productive to learn here? (Especially when behind the scenes, it was NetEase’s retreat from western game development that played a key role?) Perhaps. The game industry does preach the value of transparency about development failures, not just successes. If nothing else it breeds a sense of community and offers insight into the fundraising process.

But guys—if you’re going to be candid with the public, just maybe save us all a headache and remember what "on the record" actually means. Embrace the fact that you can’t always control the narrative, and maybe you’ll understand how the public responds to your words. -Bryant Francis