Destructoid Checkpoint: End of Year Episode

2025 is just a few days from being in the bag. It has been a very unusual year, seeming to give us a torrent of bad news in the gaming space, from layoffs to price increases, hardware shortages to cancellations and studio closures, while also releasing a deluge of absolutely wonderful games. 

I’m unsure if a year in this space has ever given me such a brutal case of whiplash in my life, but it is, I feel, readily apparent that the industry needs to change. Whether it will or won’t do that will likely be the subject of 52 newsletters next year, but for now, let’s take a little look at the year that is sailing away into the rear view.

Xbox embraces multiplatform

Much to the annoyance of diehard Xbox fans, Xbox is not immune to corporate pressure. After convincing the rest of Microsoft to let them have $70 billion to spend on new companies, they then had to figure out how to make all that money back.

With hardware sales in the toilet, the sensible option was to just go fully ham on becoming a multiplatform company. While the aforementioned Xbox enjoyers may not have had the best reaction to this, it’s good news for gamers overall. Now all we need is PlayStation to start getting their bigger games onto PC faster, and onto Xbox at all, and we’ll be in a great spot. 

Sony and the great live-service debacle

After betting the farm on live-service titles under Jim Ryan, Sony has taken a step back, cancelling some projects and likely strongly regretting the purchase of Bungie, the company that was supposed to be its live-service maven. 

This is potentially good news for gamers, as it hopefully means a higher focus on meaningful single-player experiences, although it also could mean that such experiences are going to be priced like live-service games. Frankly, it’s often hard to know exactly what Sony is going to do. Is it too much to hope that they do the right thing?

The Switch 2

It might be a little mean, but where the original Switch felt revolutionary, the Switch 2 has felt like a continuation of the dullest hardware generation of all time. There just hasn’t seemed to be a lot of the punch, pop, and pizzazz that I associate with big leaps and bounds in hardware, but you also have to wonder about what ground is really left to cover.

Graphics look absolutely marvelous, but the thrill of that hunt is over when you realize just how damaging the focus of it has been on the industry as a whole. Art design has, in many cases, been slaughtered upon the altar of graphical fidelity. Nobody really seems all that interested in picking up where F.E.A.R left off and making enemies scary and smart. Let the graphics arms race die, please.

Layoffs 

It would be easier to name the companies that didn't make any layoffs this year. Some of the largest publishers on the planet found themselves in positions of cost-cutting, which always seems to involve jettisoning bodies. Meanwhile, smaller development teams owned by bigger entities seemed to be the first on the chopping block when it came to streamlining efforts to appease stakeholders. 

We can at least allow ourselves to feel hopeful that in 2026, these companies will have normalized a little bit, be running with operational costs that make more sense for their income, and may not need to let anybody else go.

Indie domination

While the definition of what makes an indie game grows more and more opaque, 2025 was a fantastic year for studios making indie games.  On multiple occasions, the game-playing public was surprised to find themselves falling in love with some new effort from a small dev team working with a small budget, or even an individual dev working alone, trying to do everything. 

Ultimately, successful indie developers are one of the best things that you could possibly have in the industry if you genuinely love games. While I suspect many successful indies will maintain their positions and stay indie developers forever, enough will hopefully filter up into the overall industry to provide fresh blood for the ever-hungry machine of AAA publishers.

That may sound like a bad thing for those particular individuals, but overall it's very good, as we need a shift away from the old guard who have been dominating the decision-making space in AAA games, as they need to be put out to pasture. 

Growing negativity

It's fair to say my biggest concern for the games industry in 2026 is if we see a potential surge in the growing tide of negativity that seems to surround almost everything these days.  It's no longer enough to simply move on from the things that you don't like. People have somehow fallen upon the idea that you should drag them with you, making that dislike a cornerstone of your personality.

I’m of the opinion that this is most likely very detrimental to people's happiness and mental health, and is something that will hopefully begin to be left in the past as more and more people find things that they genuinely like and find a great sense of reward in producing content for the modern internet around those topics. 

You can only wallow in what you consider misery for so long until you actually become miserable, and people need to do a better job of drawing the line between critique and obsession with things they don’t like. 

That’s it. Go away.

I took over writing this newsletter in May of 2025, and since then, I have ambled from week to week with little preset plan. Whatever was most interesting got the ink, be that industry happenings or my own thoughts on topics. 

It has been a pleasure and a genuine joy to entertain the thousands of people who read this thing weekly, and I hope you have a wonderful end to your year. 

Here is hoping for a pleasant and prosperous 2026, where I hope your dreams come true, and you find plenty of fun games to play, and interesting people to play them with.

Athbhliain faoi mhaise dhuit,

Aidan