Happy New Year from TheSixthAxis!

Happy New Year!

We’ve made it once more around the Sun, putting 2024 behind us and looking forward to a 2025 that’s full of hope, optimism and brightness… OK, so this coming year (and the next four years, truth be told) are sure to instil a lot of fear and trepidation in a lot of people around the world, but if the real world is looking to be rather doomy and gloomy, at least we have games to look forward to. There’s even a new Doom!

On the gaming front, 2024 was a year with a lot of highs and lows. Perhaps more than any other year, this past twelve months were stacked with remakes and remasters, with Silent Hill 2 and Persona 3 Reload really standing  out as being the equal of new big budget games. And what games those were, as well? Helldivers 2 and Palworld made the start of the year about silly co-op action, the end of the year was really all about Astro Bot, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and a great Call of Duty in the form of Black Ops 6, and it was all capped – Fedora’d? – off by Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

However, there’s been a lot of change across the industry this year. Ignominious flops in the form of Suicide Squad and Concord – the latter failing so badly that Sony delisted the game and shut down the debutant studio – made the risks of big budget game development and the expectations of live service games more apparent than ever. Meanwhile, major companies continued to make layoffs and shut down studios including Microsoft shuttering Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks (the latter rescued a few months later by Krafton) and Arkane Austin, Ubisoft closing down XDefiant, Meta closing Ready at Dawn, London Studio closing, and more.

It’s really saying something when one of the standout moments of The Game Awards wasn’t a GOTY acceptance speech or glitzy new trailer, but rather the highlighting of the work of Amir Satvat, setting up a community for the thousands affected by the mass layoffs. We really hope to see this downward trend turned around in the next year or two.

2025 looks to be a huge year for games, which ought to help a little. Nintendo will finally announce and presumably release the Nintendo Switch 2, there’s big upcoming games such as Ghost of Yotei, Doom: The Dark Ages, Civilization VII, Death Stranding 2 and, of course, Grand Theft Auto 6, and we’ll be here to cover them all as best we can.

And with that, it’s just left to me to wish you once again a very Happy New Year from the entire TSA team, to thank you for visiting our humble gaming site through the year, and to say we hope you’ll continue to join us for all your gaming news and reviews in 2025!