Polygon’s Editor’s Letter is a column from Editor-in-Chief Chris Plante that reflects on the video game and entertainment industries, their communities, and Polygon itself. New editions appear in the first week of each month.
The past 12 months will be remembered for an estimated 14,600 layoffs, a drought of venture capital investment, and the first “unrelease” of a major first-party game. When “sluggish growth” is the silver lining, you know things are rough.
2025 — a year stuffed with promising new hardware and game releases — should be better. And yet, 2024’s cloud of discomforting uncertainty lingers. Will 2025 actually be a better year for the video game industry than 2024?
Picture the classic zombie-movie trope in which a band of traveling survivors finally reaches a safe zone, only to wonder, as the barricade rises, whether the open arms of fellow survivors will greet them… or a horde of feral cannibals.
2025 could echo 2012, when THQ and 538 Game filed for Chapter 11, Nintendo launched the doomed Wii U, Zynga’s social game model came crashing back to Earth, and Sony invested over $380 million in cloud gaming.
Or maybe change will break in the other direction. 2025 might resemble 2020, when Microsoft shrewdly acquired Bethesda and parent company ZeniMax, Microsoft and Sony launched a successful new generation of home consoles, and the collision of the COVID-19 pandemic (bad!) and an abundance of free-to-play mobile games like Among Us (good!) inspired a new era of social gaming.
Here are the six storylines that will decide the outcome of the year to come.
The future of one of the biggest game publishers and its 18,666 employees
Ubisoft ascended to top-tier publisher status in the mid-2000s, riding the success of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and the smorgasbord of Tom Clancy shooters. A lot can change in two decades. The company now struggles to keep those same aging series relevant. Worse, its executive-level focus on promising business models (IP partnerships, games as service, microtransactions) appears to be a higher priority than creating compelling games.
Now, Ubisoft — which, under family leadership, had dodged hostile takeovers in the past — is more vulnerable than ever before. Many of its big releases, like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws, failed to meet expectations. The upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been delayed to accommodate a “renewed focus on gameplay quality.” And Beyond Good and Evil 2 has now been in development for over 15 years, the longest development of any video game from a major publisher — raising questions about how it could turn a profit if and when it’s released.
A sale is as likely as it is complicated. How would an international buyer navigate Ubisoft’s reliance on Canadian tax incentives? Following the recent TikTok turmoil in the U.S., will Chinese companies like Tencent think twice about an acquisition? An estimated 18,666 individuals worldwide wait for answers.
Floundering with console gamers, Xbox will turn to the flourishing handheld market
“I want my Lenovo Legion Go to feel like an Xbox,” Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, told Polygon last March. The Xbox executive hasn’t been subtle about his love for powerful handheld gaming PCs that have, following Valve’s Steam Deck, become a rapidly growing portion of the gaming hardware market.
No doubt Spencer, known for his hundreds of hours spent in games like Destiny 2, gets the appeal as a gamer. Surely he’s even more excited by the financial opportunity for his company. With Xbox console hardware a distant third behind Sony and Nintendo, handheld hardware may provide an alternative and comparably untapped audience.
But at CES 2025, Legion revealed that Spencer’s beloved handheld line will be expanding with a new variant that launches not with an Xbox interface but with Valve’s Steam operating system — and its colossally successful PC gaming digital marketplace.
Will Microsoft finally create a portable gaming OS to rival, if not best, the Linux-based SteamOS? Maybe the company’s Xbox digital storefront could begin to compete with Valve’s Steam or even Epic’s EGS? Or will Microsoft be too late as the PC gaming handheld market grows exponentially, and Nintendo launches a new Switch rumored to play games comparable to those on the Xbox Series S?
Rockstar’s parent company will show us what does and doesn’t work in AAA games
All eyes are on Grand Theft Auto 6 to break every record in not just gaming sales, but all of entertainment. However, how much can we really learn about the industry from the release of its greatest aberration?
Keep your eyes instead on a trio of AAA franchises under the umbrella of Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two. 2K, another publisher under Take-Two, has announced 2025 releases for three of its biggest franchises: Mafia, Borderlands, and Civilization. Whether they find an audience will clarify if gamers still have an appetite for new entries in gaming’s biggest franchises and established genres, or if we’re seeing a shift to new stories and styles of play.
Indie survival in a busy year of AAA
Last year, I wrote at length about how the release of thousands of games a year has become a challenge for both the people who play games and those who create them. But as difficult as last year was for indie developers, they had relatively few major AAA releases to compete against. They won’t be so fortunate this year.
Some of the biggest franchises in gaming will get new releases this year, accompanied by mainstream marketing campaigns that will fill website banner ads and major sporting event commercial breaks. Independent creators won’t just have to compete for gamers’ money but for their time. Many of the big new releases are meant to consume dozens — if not hundreds — of hours, occupying permanent residence on millions of hard drives.
In 2024, games like Enshrouded, Balatro, and Pacific Drive filled voids in the release calendar. Don’t expect the indies of 2025 to have as many of those opportunities.
Microsoft’s big Game Pass bet will be tested with its first significant year of releases from its acquisitions
Since 2019, Microsoft has acquired seven developers along with the publishers ZeniMax and Activision Blizzard. The acquisitions in total cost nearly $100 billion and resulted in Microsoft having over 30 teams actively working on new video games. Why take such a huge risk?
At first, the answer appeared to be Game Pass, Microsoft’s subscription service that allows players to play hundreds of games on Xbox, PC, and via the cloud for a monthly fee. But after a spectacular start, Game Pass’ growth has been a bit of a mystery.
Last year, Microsoft pushed the notion that everything is an Xbox, from your console and PC to your phone and smart TV. To reignite Game Pass, the company’s leadership plans to get the app on practically every screen. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Game Pass playing on a Samsung refrigerator.
Of course, people will only subscribe to Game Pass if it is the best, easiest, and cheapest way to play the new game they care about. Or, to put it another way: People need a reason every month to use Game Pass. With its many studios prepared to release new games, we’ll see if Microsoft’s unprecedented bet pays off, beginning next month with the release of Avowed, a sort of spiritual sibling of the beloved Elder Scrolls series from the studio that made The Outer Worlds and Fallout: New Vegas.
The Switch 2
It’s coming. Since the Nintendo 64, Nintendo has bounced between hits and disappointments with home consoles. However, its handhelds seem to always find their audience. Which trajectory will the Switch 2 take? And will big-budget game studios benefit from having a Nintendo handheld powerful enough to play their wares?
