2023: A Year of Highs and Lows

Christmas is over, and soon 2023 will be too. Hopefully it’s been a good year for you, and you had a very merry Christmas.

New Years is a time for contemplation. To look to the past and to the future. Today I figured we’d look back at the last year. I’ve already written about what an amazing 12 months it has been in terms of games, but that’s only part of the story.

The truth is that 2023 was only as good as it was because of covid. Delays upon delays put us in a position where so many games were being released. And not just that, but consistently too. You don’t have to go back very far to find years where March through September were dead. Not the case in 2023.

This isn’t a bad thing, of course. If games need delays, it is better that they get delays. But the flip side of that was the other, less attractive part of coronavirus – that all those staff members hired to make up the loss while work-from-home was being figured out started getting laid off. In their thousands.

Embracer, who were seemingly in a strong position a few years ago, closed down a bevy of talented studios and fired their staffs in the weeks before Christmas. But this has been happening throughout the year, at most publishers. Sony might shut a studio, and is telling its studios to cut costs (read: cut staff).

And so it has been a very difficult 12 months for the people who make games. And an almost arbitrary click into 2024 isn’t going to make it any better.

The Bright Side of 2023

The business of making games is very different from the business of consuming them. People don’t really know how the sausage is made, and they don’t really want to know. That’s not a problem, but it will mean that much of the downsizing won’t be felt. 2023 will be a blockbuster year because of Hogwarts Legacy and Final Fantasy XVI. It’ll be the year people got to play Spider-Man 2 (and Wolverine, if you want to talk about negative things to happen in the industry…).

It’ll be the year when Cyberpunk finally reached its potential. 2023 will be the year Microsoft started their new release cadence, beginning the year with the surprise launch of Hi-Fi Rush. That’ll prove to be really important in a couple of years time.

It is because of the hard work of so many people that don’t have jobs this Christmas that we can enjoy these marvellous games. Gamers are famously toxic, and I can imagine there are times when positivity is hard to come by within the development houses themselves. Random Twitter rants are not the most constructive of criticism.

And so I hope that for all the things we think of when we think of 2023 – the good and the bad – that we remember the people behind them. We need empathy and patience. As we enter into a fresh year, it suddenly feels more important that ever before.