The year is over! Or near enough. Sound the refrain that has become all too familiar over the last few years: What a: year for videogames/nightmare/success/disaster. This might be the only time on Eurogamer I can get away with using the old cliche ‘mixed bag’, hey. As everyone else is putting their minds together to come up with awards in a range of arbitrary categories, we thought it was only right that we did the same in celebration of this strange old year and some of the great, funny, wild, stupid, and bad things that have happened in it – with our tongue firmly planted in our cheek.
As noted, 2025 has been a year that has been pretty great in terms of the act of playing video games – we’ve had new hardware, indie darlings, even some bangers from big-name publishers. But it’s also been a mess of AI gen nonsense, terrible losses of jobs and with them talent from the industry, and an unending cavalcade of disasters outside of games – which, to be fair, does lend positives to locking oneself inside and playing video games.
Anyway, in honor of all that – here’s some acknowledgements of things that stood tall in 2025 to us, in this tradition imported from our sister site VG247. Once you’re done experiencing 2025’s delights, maybe take a trip down memory lane with their 2024 awards?
Best Logistical Execution: Nintendo Switch 2 Review Units
Here’s a look behind the curtain. In the run up to release, Nintendo confirmed that there would be no pre-release review access to the Switch 2 console. We got to go hands-on with the machine and its key launch titles at the grand reveal events – but the media wouldn’t be getting the machine itself early. This was due to “important features and updates” that would only be available in a day-one patch, Nintendo said.
This isn’t ideal, obviously. Our job is to talk to you about the newest games, and we can’t talk about them properly until we’ve played them. Some readers are eagerly awaiting coverage. Others are letting off party poppers on X, hollering that Nintendo is finally cutting the Evil Games Media out. And in the end none of it really matters all that much anyway, ‘cos god, it’s only video games and you’re probably buying Mario Kart anyway, even if it’s not a 5/5.
Whatever the reason for Nintendo’s decision to not send out hardware, the company has to be credited at least in the UK for what happened next. We were always going to get Switch 2 units from Nintendo to help cover their games, especially since machines used to review pre-release games need to be set up in a particular way that not everyone might want to do to their personal machines. But Nintendo meant it: we could have the machines when they launched. As soon as they launched.
A natural assumption would be that someone would just rock up and chuck a box on your porch at some point on June 5th, launch day. But Nintendo UK went a step further: arranging a one-to-one courier direct from their offices to the media’s front door. Two members of Team Eurogamer and colleagues across the British media found couriers walking up their driveways at 12:59pm on June 4th – one minute before the Switch 2 officially went on sale in New Zealand, at midnight on the 5th. These couriers were so on the money that they must have been sitting around the corner waiting for the clock to strike one – so that Nintendo’s word about no machines until it was officially available somewhere in the world rang true. That must have been a logistical nightmare to arrange – but it was definitely making the most of a suboptimal situation and for us, scrambling to cover the year’s biggest launch, it was much appreciated.
Hospital Pass of the Year: Xbox Game Pass Lady
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a ‘Hospital Pass’ is a British term for being put in a difficult position. It can refer to roles in sports likely to take a heavy tackle, but in Britain it’s most often heard politically: a stony-faced minister forced to trot out on telly to defend something awful has been ‘given a hospital pass’, in British political parlance.
In that finest tradition, we must extend our congratulations to the unidentified articulate woman put front-and-centre of Xbox’s official video titled “What’s new and what’s changing with Xbox Game Pass”, the video put out on October 1st to essentially announce a bunch of price rises and changes that fans weren’t going to take well.
Xbox’s usually very chatty and eager-to-appear executives were all rendered mysteriously unavailable to appear in this particular video. They may have just been busy. Or it might’ve been because this was destined to be the sort of video where the top comment reads, “Nobody can kill Xbox better than Microsoft themselves”. Another top comment reads “A slap in the face to loyal fans”. Surely, the biggest and most impressive hospital pass of the year has to be the one delivered to the soul who became the smiling assassin delivering that thump to the face.
Best Dogged Diligence: Firaxis for Civilization 7
One game that isn’t really in the talks for Game of the Year as much as one might have expected pre-release is Civilization 7. The thing about Civ is that I’d call it one of the world’s first ‘living’ games – ever since 1996’s Civ 2, each base game has been just that – a basis that has been built on over subsequent expansions. I don’t think any recent Civ has launched with a quality to match the series’ formidable reputation – that has come over time.
But even with that said, Civ 7 has doubtlessly been the rockiest. It took some big swings – some necessary, some less so. Some were successful… some, yes, less-so. But Firaxis has to be credited for what has followed: an absolutely blistering pace of patches, fixes, changes, feedback, iteration, and so on – moving more quickly than they ever have to make changes and improve the game.
Civilization 7 still has a long way to go. But Firaxis’ work on the game over the half year and change since its release is certainly one of this year’s greatest displays of diligence in the face of furious fans and torrid Steam reviews – and should be applauded. I hope, over the coming year, they can go all the way and chisel this into another all-timer. At which point all those who held fire can grab it for a tenner.
Studio of the Year: Obsidian
Avowed, Grounded 2 Early Access, and The Outer Worlds 2 – seldom does a large-scale studio, especially one at a publisher the size of Microsoft and in the modern context, have a year like this. But Obsidian Entertainment appears to have cracked the code to some degree – smaller and perhaps less forcefully bombastic games, but more often – iterative, thoughtful, and clever in their use of resources.
It’s true that none of these games was ever going to be in the running for outright game of the year – but the thing that Obsidian has perhaps most cleverly zeroed in on is that perhaps not every game needs to be fodder for fawning wows at how it’s pushing the medium forward or what have you. Sometimes all we need are cosy, welcoming, engaging video games with some damn good role-playing. It’s an incredible run – and long may it continue.
Worst Trend: All this AI Bollocks and all of its implications
Look. This AI thing isn’t going anywhere. Of that I think we can all be absolutely certain; to some degree this technology is going to stick and remain a part of our lives. But in the sprint to be ‘first’ to this technology… Honestly, what are we bloody doing? The planet is boiling, you can’t build a high-end PC without handing over a million pounds as hardware prices explode (and how will this impact a theoretical next-gen? We dread to think), and it sure looks like a not-insignificant chunk of the world economy is not happily floating along in an increasingly precarious-looking bubble.
All this is said without even mentioning the moral implications around art, jobs, and the human touch in product design. Or, indeed, the absolutely honking discourse that emerges when those things are raised. Even if you think there will be uses for this technology that can have a positive impact on development timelines, working conditions, or whatever else – the cost right now hardly seems worth even the greatest, most outlandish promises on the table.
Number Crunch of the Year: Xbox
The Deathloop Award for Best Game Only Journos Liked: Baby Steps
Baby Steps is a misunderstood masterpiece of game design and meta-narrative that you all assumed was “rage slop”.
Look, Nate is going to fall over, often, with horrific consequences for your progress, your nerves, your basic sense of self worth. But Nate is not falling over because the game is treacherous, Nate is falling over because his feet are going exactly where you tell them to. Every time you mess it up, every time you fall back down the mountain, it’s not because the system has failed, it’s because the system is working exactly as designed. There’s definitely a metaphor in there somewhere.
Baby Steps is a genius game about games that plays you like a fiddle because it knows how to exploit all the assumptions you make in order to set traps for you. The pavlovian conditioning that decades of open world games have reinforced, where you expect to be rewarded for showing up to places. You expect a dopamine hit for checking out a pile of rocks that is just a pile of rocks. And it hurts, the hole where that dopamine isn’t. It hurts!
In a much more compelling, endearing, and hilariously funny way than any Soulslike has managed, Baby Steps forces you to embrace inadequacy. I’m not being facetious when I say I think it is the Game of the Year in 2025. And it’s not a forgettable, mid-as-hell experience like so many of the biggest games of a given year are: it’s a true piece of art. It makes you question so many things about the medium that you take for granted, or just have come to accept. And it makes you feel. Physically feel, in your chest, in your gut. And not all of those feelings are good. In fact, it dares to make you feel bad. There are so many intoxicating layers to it. It’s a true millennial odyssey, an examination of open world game design, a piss-take of Death Stranding, a piss take of YOU. It has crushed my spirit and I can only admire it for that. Do I recommend it? God no. But you should play it anyway, if only to experience a rare, pure, undiluted hit of intent.
The Nathan Drake Award for Cognitive Dissonance: Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles
Summer Games Fest was pretty good this year. I don’t just mean the livestream – though that was decent – but I also mean ‘Play Days’, the in-person campus where members of the industry and press gather for a catch-up and to see the latest upcoming stuff. It was definitely a step down from 2024 – this year’s Play Days Campus could be comfortably fully-explored in a day, proof positive of a slightly ‘down’ year – but it was nevertheless fun. While the madness of ‘classic’ E3 will in a sense never be supplanted in our hearts, there’s a lot to be said for the comparative tranquillity of the Play Days Campus, which lets you do more work while doing a lot less damage to your body and mind.
Anyway, remember in the 2010s when we’d constantly talk about the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of playing a nice guy like Nathan Drake who is a soft sweetheart in cutscenes but mows down hundreds of men with wives and children in gameplay? That’s the most common type of tonal discordance in games, but at SGF we got another in the form of Los Angeles burning just a few blocks from the Play Days Campus as protests against ICE escalated across the city. At one point, you could see plumes of smoke rising in the near distance from inside the SGF Play Days Campus. At another point, two Eurogamer writers sat in a pub as the protests surged past outside, a panicked PR worried about the group of media they were chaperoning getting stuck between protestors and police.
It all makes all that video game stuff feel rather frivolous, doesn’t it? A sense of guilt about that fact – us lot fiddling about with preview builds while the city was on fire with rage – pervaded, too. And while maybe it was just a quieter year for games being ready to be shown, perhaps this mood is another part of why the campus felt quieter – and why subsequent events, like The Game Awards, felt to have lower international attendance. What a year, eh?
Wingman of the Year: Death Stranding’s Norman Reedus for Age Verification
As Britain continues on the bizarre trajectory where a nominally left-wing government drives forward a load of weirdly right-leaning and vaguely dystopian policies, people could be rest assured that at least one man would have their back: Death Stranding’s Sam Porter Bridges, aka Norman Reedus.
When “robust” age check systems were rolled out across the internet as part of the new Online Safety Act, the logic was that you’d have to submit a photograph of yourself staring double-chinned down into the laptop camera if you wanted to do something as outlandish as read your social media DMs. Or use Discord. Or Reddit. The list goes on, stretching far beyond the raunchy sites it’s primarily designed to block.
But in an amazing quirk of said robust systems, whatever neural network was scanning and cataloguing your face seemingly couldn’t see past Death Stranding’s (admittedly very good) character models: so you could boot up photo mode and show some age verification screens Norman Reedus’ gurning photo mode expressions in order to bypass the age filter. So: annoying, inconvenient, and ineffective! I suppose that’s British governance in a nutshell, really. At least Reedus and Kojima have our backs, ey?
Healthiest Genre: MMORPGs
There has been no sadder year to be a MMORPG fan than 2025. In 12 months we’ve seen multiple cancellations, layoffs, and the outright closure of a handful of studios. If any big winners exist, they’ve been ancient games that have somehow weathered the storm. World of Warcraft still exists, at least until Microsoft puts an AI-generated gun in its mouth and pulls the handle.
Microsoft’s layoffs led to Project Blackbird getting cancelled, Amazon’s sudden departure from first-party publishing has left New World’s marooned, and the once-cancelled Lord of the Rings MMO somehow cancelled again. Netease has itself been an MMO serial killer, smothering Jackalyptic’s Warhammer MMO, clobbering Fantastic Pixel Castle to death, and near-fatally wounding T-Minus Zero.
As a result MMO fans have flocked to old faithfuls, games so long in the tooth that they’ve become part of the furniture. Old School RuneScape has seen a recent spike in players, as has Eve Online, Warframe, Guild Wars 2… Final Fantasy 11 teasing a new zone cementing an era of nostalgia is firmly here. Making an MMO today instead of some live service gacha slopathon is a hard sell, especially when said slop is starting to sour. The typical age of the MMO fan also trends older. Chances are if you remember how to get Thunderfury Blessed Blade of the Windseeker you are an old wanker, sorry.
Will the suffering end with New Years fireworks? No. Highlights to look forward to in 2026 include Blizzard rolling out The Burning Crusade yet again to the emphatic elation of the truly depressed, and Maple Story Classic for the same crowd, only quirkier. Fantastic.
Best Weaponized Nostalgia: Donkey Kong Bananza
There has seldom been a game that clearly understood the assignment as perfectly as Donkey Kong Bananza, at least as far as pleasing long-time fans goes. But in a classic Nintendo fashion, Bananza holds back on a lot of its nostalgia. It’s almost like Nintendo wants to prove a point: we don’t need to do this. We can make a great game without any of this nonsense. And so they do.
Here’s DK in a new setting, with a new cast of characters. Even a passing appearance of Diddy, Dixie, and Rambi is held back until roughly the mid game, almost as if to prove a point. But as Bananza wears on, the point is proven. So the dam is allowed to burst. And if you’re a thirty-something with certain childhood memories, you’ll probably have tears in your eyes. Bravo.
Best sign Next Year will be just as messy: Nvidia’s planned GPU supply slash
The good, the bad, the ugly – sometimes you finish a year and it feels like we’re ready to hit reset and load a new save, or whatever other clunky gaming analogy we’re going with next. Sometimes you finish and it feels like nothing is really going to change. Like the nega-zone that was New Year during the pandemic, finishing this year it feels like… we’re all treading water, still. Right?
We’re all still waiting for GTA6. All of the real world problems feel to have not moved on at all. And that AI thirst is only intensifying, which does indeed have a knock-on effect.
Right at the death of 2025’s news cycle, the news broke that Nvidia is allegedly dramatically reducing the supply of its current-generation GeForce graphics cards for the first half of 2026 by as much as 40% compared to 2025. This isn’t a natural demand contraction – it’s a direct response to the price hikes in key components as part of the current AI-driven crisis. But this is key for games. If this is a wider trend, this could have a knock-on effect on everything – the timing of next-gen of both consoles and PC GPUs, the availability of existing hardware… and pricing, of course. Strap yourselves in, folks! 2026 is almost here!
