2024 was the year for Microsoft’s big turning point | Opinion

At the beginning of 2024, the most frequently expressed concern about this year in the games industry was that it would have a very sparse and overwhelming release calendar, at least compared to the spectacular heights of 2023. This was to some extent a ripple effect from the pandemic years : a backlog of delayed software hit the market during 2023, meaning that with many major studios to be in the early stages of new projects so 2024’s line-up doesn’t look very inspiring.

With the benefit of hindsight, that fear didn’t quite come true; or at least, what decline in the 2024 release schedule we saw was spread pretty unevenly around different parts of the industry.

The fear of a fallow in 2024 did not arise at all – at least not for everyone

From a consumer perspective, it’s actually been a pretty solid year for gaming in the end. It may ultimately come to be seen as the calm before 2025’s GTA 6 storm, but this year has held up remarkably well thanks to a combination of hit titles that nobody really saw coming – Helldivers 2 and Astro Bot being particularly notable here, after rescuing Sony from what would otherwise have been a rather shockingly empty year in the middle of its console cycle – and especially in the back half of the year some games that really defied expectations.

In terms of expectations being defied, quite a few games that had been largely written off as development hell nightmares turned up and actually ended up being pretty good. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the best example; on a personal level, I find its gameplay a little too much of a departure from previous games in the series for my taste, but taken on its own merits, it’s a very enjoyable game and far better than many people would have dared to hope for after so many years.

Silent Hill 2 is a remake that I don’t think many expected to be quite as good, despite its developer’s pedigree in the horror genre. The truly unexpected surprise of the year, however, is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – a title that honestly feels like it has no right to be quite as great fun as it actually is.

The fear of a fallow year overall did not arise – at least not for everyone. For some publishers, the danger of 2024 becoming a lost year was very well-founded, with some companies unable to find a hit title from one end of the year to the other.

Poor old Ubisoft is the unwilling flag bearer for the hapless bunch; it had probably hoped that the relatively quiet release schedule of some other major publishers would give Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin’s Creed Shadows a chance to shine, but the former title languished (probably a victim of Disney’s mishandling of the Star Wars brand as much as any problem with Ubisoft itself), and the latter has been delayed to 2025. Ubisoft isn’t the only publisher struggling to find hits in 2024, but its ongoing struggle to reinventing and reviving its business is likely to be a story that drags on well into next year.

However, it wasn’t just certain publishers who had a rough 2024; the year’s successes were also spread rather unevenly across game genres. I wrote last week about the torrid year live-service games had, with high-profile failures ranging from Sony’s Concord disaster to announcements that the likes of Suicide Squad and XDefiant would be shutting down. Helldivers 2 and Marvel Rivals were the only real bright spots in that market, though it’s worth noting that established games like Fortnite have continued to perform very nicely, even as the live service model gets clumsy everywhere else (and even the battered and battered Overwatch 2 seems to have had a bit of a comeback year).

On the other hand, it was a great year for single-player action games, thanks to the likes of Black Myth Wukong, Stellar Blade, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and many others. It is also no coincidence that two of the highlights mentioned here – Marvel Rivals and Black Myth Wukong – are from Chinese developers; after many false starts and a huge amount of investment, this was the year China really started to flex its muscles as one of the major global centers of game development. For all that, though, I suspect that when we come to look back at 2024 through a future lens, the most important story will be what happened to Microsoft this year.

(Buying Activision Blizzard) was always part of a huge business transformation in the making, and Xbox’s existing identity as a platform was always on the chopping block

This has been an incredibly pivotal year for Microsoft’s strategy as a games publisher and platform holder, as it embarks on one of the boldest and arguably most difficult transitions any company in this industry has ever attempted. It’s a transition that seemed inevitable to many observers of its battle to buy Activision Blizzard – there were plenty of voices warning that the completion of this acquisition would effectively spell the end of Xbox as we knew it – but it nevertheless seems to have blindsided many of the most ardent Xbox fans (most of whom were vocal supporters of the deal in question).

Spending that much money to buy one of the industry’s biggest publishers was never supposed to be about simply supporting a console company that consistently lost to both Sony and Nintendo in the global market. This was always a major business transformation in the making, and Xbox’s existing identity as a platform was always at stake.

Microsoft has become one of the world’s largest and most influential publishers (boosted massively in that role this year by Black Ops 6 as a high point in the series’ recent history, and Indiana Jones being so well received), but in the process it has become something very other than a traditional platform holder. Xbox hardware will now necessarily play second fiddle to the broader idea of ​​Xbox as a platform service and Microsoft as a third-party game publisher. The business that will emerge will undoubtedly be more robust and successful; whether it will still be recognizably something that Xbox was in the past remains to be seen.

One thing to watch out for in the coming months is the consumer response to the ‘This Is An Xbox’ campaign, which is a brave attempt to explain and outline this complex strategy to the general consumer audience. Not to be a knock on the campaign (it’s a very well-executed piece of marketing), but to make an anecdotal judgment from the confused reactions I’ve personally heard, I’m not sure it lands quite the way Microsoft had the hope.

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Therefore, 2025 may well be a year of experimentation for the company as it tries to explain what exactly Xbox means now to a broad audience that isn’t quite as concerned with boardroom buzzwords as the people to whom these ideas were pitched internally .

As always, we end the year with some broad strokes that describe how the next year will probably shape up. We know it will be largely defined by the impact of GTA 6 and Nintendo’s new console launch; we can expect stories like Microsoft’s repositioning and redefining of Xbox, Ubisoft’s attempt to rebuild its publishing success, and the ongoing implosion of the live service dream to continue to unfold throughout the year.

However, we can at least hope that the huge wave of layoff and college closure stories that have made headlines in the past two years won’t follow us into 2025; Fingers crossed for a year of green shoots and optimism instead.