2025 Gaming Predictions

[Issun]

This is a thing that is happening.

Switch 2 will have Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Super Mario Galaxy 1&2 Collection by the end of the year.

Chrono Trigger and Xenogears HD-2D remakes (CT is the more likely)

A flop even bigger than Concord will make the industry briefly reassess live service gaming, though nothing will come of it.

Gameplay footage of Final Fantasy XVII

Deck Nine will fold and the Life is Strange series will either die with it or be given to another studio.

The move of indie games towards low poly early PS1 graphics ala Crow Country and Mouthwashing will continue, but now branching out to other genres

Metroid Prime 4 will sell okay. People will fight forever over whether it would have sold better as a Switch 2 launch title.

New Pikmin, Pokemon and Animal Crossing will be announced and possibly released in 2025.

At least one indie game will come out of nowhere and be one of my favorite games of the year.

At least one person on TT will predict Silksong and/or Skies of Arcadia HD and be disappointed yet again.

 

[Aurelia]

Switch 2 will have Elden Ring (or ds3) is my one huge prediction.

 

[Daikaiju]

The Upcoming Nintendo Direct will show off the next 3D Mario and a brief teaser for the next main line Zelda, both for Switch 2, the latter we won't get until maybe 2-3 years later.

Star Citizen's constant dithering will come to a head, for good or ill.

Heroes of the Storm will come to Game Pass along with a major reboot patch.

Hades 2 will release in full and the memes and fanart will be glorious.

Wayforward announces a new Shantae and remaster of one of its other IPs.

Capcom will tease mercilessly about doing something with MegaMan Legends.

New Animal Crossing will be announced.

Nintendo finally remembers StarTropics exsists, but not in a way that will satisfy longtime fans.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Switch 2 does something like casting for two screens, a sort of better and less awkward WiiU but trying to keep very core to what made the Switch popular. Only brings back one DS game remake this year though but more come trickling out in 2026 despite that being the most obvious move. Indie companies will unleash a deluge of hidden role party games in the Among Us vein.

This is the year. Triple A Muppet game. My preference would be FMV but that won't happen. Could be great or bad but will take a big swing.

A new Simpsons game. Mostly likely is some mobile shit but I could see a "from the former Telltale guys" adventure game with the cast

 

[otakujeb]

Switch 2 releases to huge success. Backwards Compatibility and new Joycons have been quasi confirmed, but there will still be an inexplicable feature missing at launch, like NSO.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will launch on the PC with horrendous optimisation that will make even high-end machines chug. It will take at least six months for a patch, and then it will run fine.

Microsoft continues to quietly leave the console market as previous XBox exclusives are released on PC, PS5, and even Switch 2. There will be a credible rumor that there will not be future XBox hardware as we know it, and the platform will transition to solely a Gamepass subscription type thing.

Sony will announce a version of the PS Portal that will stream games without a PS5, even games that are not on PS Plus.

Silksong will be delayed past 2025.

The next 3D Mario game is announced, but is not a launch title for the Switch 2.

Metroid Prime 4 is a launch title for Switch 2, but will have cross-gen compatibility with the Switch.

Metroid 6, Splatoon 4, and Mario Kart 9 announced for Switch 2.

Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy Tactics HD-2D.

No announcement of a new Zelda, but there will be rumors of both 2D and 3D titles in the works.

Mega Man Legends Collection.

 

[Baudshaw]

Here's an absolute boatload of predictions...

In general, 2025 will be the year of Nintendo and Indies.

Switch 2 will be fully revealed in January 2025, released in May 2025.

Initial sales for Switch 2 will lag behind the Switch but still be an incredibly good Nintendo console release.

A new 3D Mario will be a launch title for the Switch 2, along with some crazy gimmick that shocks the world.

This new 3D Mario will be more multiplayer focused.

There will be no mention of a 3D Zelda, but a 2D Zelda will be launched by the end of the year.

Legends ZA will be a cross-gen title, taking place in the past, with sizable lore reveals and a more complicated story.

Gen 10 of Pokemon will not release in 2025, with only a very slight teaser.

A very old JRPG will be remade on an HD-2D style by fall 2025, I'm throwing a wild guess and saying Vandal Hearts.

A new Animal Crossing will be released by summer 2025, it will have a massive social focus and be one of the best-selling switch games to date.

There will be no other Mario spinoffs that release in 2025, but Mario Kart Nine will have a new subtitle and a cool new racing gimmick. It will have no crossover characters.

There will be a Smash Bros Ultimate remaster with all DLC bundled in plus a new side mode. Other games that will get remastered include Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Echoes of Wisdom.

BOTW+TOTK will be sold in a cool special edition bundle.

On the Fire Emblem front, they will have a new remake of FE4, plus teasing a wacky new FE project.

Splatoon 4 will be teased, but not released, as Splatoon 3 winds down.

A new horror IP will take people by surprise, and release by the end of 2025.

Ring Fit Adventure 2 will be teased, but not released.

There will be no Indie Games that I will consider better than my favorite of all time (Celeste), but they will get close.

Xbox will release no new hardware. They will have more PC Exclusives than Console Exclusives.

Halo 6 will garner some sort of backlash or controversy in its announcement.

Playstation will release a new PS handheld.

Astro Bot 2 will be announced with massive fanfare.

Minecraft will release five "drops": two medium sized, three small sized. Overall, the reputation of Minecraft's development slightly improves. As for servers, I suspect a sharp decline in Hypixel, a moderate decline in MCC Island, stagnation for Wynncraft, stagnation for 2b2t, a moderate rise in medium-sized servers, and a moderate rise in a totally new server.

Crusader Kings 3 rises slightly as more DLC is released.

Civilization 7 gets released, with similar sales and popularity to Civ 6. A major DLC is announced for the end of the year, and people applaud the new gameplay, although the monetization gets a few eyebrow raises.

Sky will be business as usual, with four new expansions plus the release of Sky: The Two Embers that becomes surprisingly popular. The last season of the year will be a botched collaboration with a musical artist.

At least 4 major Videogame Film/TV adaptations will occur and be received moderately to positively.

AI will be totally absent from the video game industry in any meaningful or publicized way.

Also, to add on, Mega Man will receive literally nothing.

 

[Bongo]

Note to my future self: I'm pretty sure this list is finished.

The fragmentation of culture is making it harder than ever for me to write predictions that I have any idea how I'll verify. Interesting things are happening everywhere! How, though, can I possibly know that they have happened? I predict that I will still feel that way when I come to confirm these predictions in the grim future of December 2025.

Let's start with Nintendo.

The Successor to the Nintendo Switch will:

1. (Easy) Have full backwards compatibility (give or take a weird edge case) with the Nintendo Switch
2. Launch in the first half of 2025, before July 1
3. Feature one major hardware capability that is not present in any current or recent console (including the Switch itself)
4. Either improve the curation and filtering of the eShop or tighten the licensing and approval process, so that there's less incidence of seeing garbage like weekly rereleases of shovelware apps or AI asset flips with "Hentai" in the title
5. Be calculated to provide a functional but suboptimal experience if you use joycons from the original Switch
6. Run a typical cross-platform game approximately as well as a Steam Deck can

Within the launch window (first six months) of the Successor to the Nintendo Switch, the following games will be released:

1. A strong Game of the Year contender on launch day
2. A new and unproven first-party IP
3. A Mario Kart game
4. A Splatoon game
5. At least one premium Nintendo-published title in each calendar month
6. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which will be a showcase for the XBox-like ability to improve the performance of (some) Switch software
7. Whatever Masahiro Sakurai has been working on since April of 2022 (it is not Super Smash Bros. 6)
8. An exclusive or timed exclusive from Capcom

Moving on....

It's going to be a grim year for premium games developed in the USA (both released and announced). There will be relatively few of them, and the ones that are here won't be as interesting. This is partly because the layoffs of 2023-2024 reduced aggregate capacity in a way that can't be recovered from so quickly, and partly because the fucking brain geniuses that did the layoffs for no good reason aren't going to suddenly change their mind about whether art matters.

On the other hand, premium games developed in China will continue to see increased international success. Even if it is mostly gacha bullshit. For the purposes of gauging the accuracy of this prediction, I'll also accept games developed in Taiwan.

In regard to those Chinese games, the xenophobic rabble-rousing against Chinese products in the USA will largely overlook games. It'll happen, but it's not going to be much of a factor.

It will also be a good year for premium games developed in Europe, despite or perhaps because of the decline of Ubisoft. In particular, we'll see good examples of them filling out the mid-range (full-price publisher-funded retail products with limited scope or production values targeting a narrower market). Note to self: keep an eye on Kepler Interactive.

Retail prices of games will increase in the USA. Now that the $59.99 barrier has been successfully breached by all major publishers, more and more games that are not the ultra-prestigious crown jewels of a publisher's annual offering will start hitting the $70 price point for the base game, even before gimmicks like "digital deluxe editions" and price discrimination DLC.

We're going to see a lot of Balatro imitators. This is already starting to happen, so my prediction is that it will continue, with a lot of the more well-differentiated products hitting the market in 2025.

In addition to Dragon Quest 1&2, Square Enix will newly announce exactly two remakes or remasters of games from their back catalog, and one of them will be released in 2025. A different publisher may be involved.

Yet another long-lost fighting game from the 90s is going to be released.

We'll see at least a teaser for the sequel to Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. @Tomm Guycot will fastidiously refuse my attempts to rig the prediction by bribing him into making it come true. I can make it worth your while, Tomm. Ineligible because this one was confirmed in 2024.

As always, an indie game that I hadn't even heard of will knock my socks off.

There will be a console port of UFO 50, and I'm going to make @Octopus Prime play it, by hook or by crook.

A sports game that is not licensed from a real-world league and does not incorporate fantastical elements will come out, be good, and attract some attention.

inZOI will release and, if reliable sales figures or estimates can be found, will exceed two million copies.

Free Stars: Children of Infinity will not slip to 2026.

They will remind us that they're still working on Dragon Quest XII.

Skies of Arcadia HD will sweep every category at the Keighleys.

 

[RT-55J]

The layoffs will continue until morale improves.

Deltarune

Silksong

Mega Man will have some wild swing for the fences that will explain the franchise's 7 year hiatus after a rather successful game. Fans will consider it to be a "slap in the face" because Mega Man's arm cannon looks marginally different from previous incarnations.

No Metroid 6. I bet that's slated for 2026, but might be delayed to 2027.

The Switch 2 will be announced as soon as they think holiday shoppers won't be offended by the announcement. I'm banking on a March announcement and a May release.

Launch year titles will include:
- Prime 4, as a cross-generation title sold under a single SKU.
- A non-Mario Kart racer. Possibly F-Zero, possibly something completely different.
- A new 3-D Mario
- Ocarina of Time 4K HD RTX -- The degree that this elaborates on and modernizes the original will be compared to FF7R, even though it will be the full game by itself.
- Nothing as bizarre as 1-2 Switch
- Another Xenoblade

Nintendo will once again refuse to rerelease Time Twist.

No new Xbox hardware, though speculation of a portable Xbox will increase to absurd levels.

Xenophobic rabble-rousing over Chinese AAA games will increase, because America can't help itself.

Somebody at a large gaming company will realize that they have enough people on hand to copy UFO 50's schitck in a small fraction of the time (results may vary).

 

[Bongo]

Nintendo will once again refuse to rerelease Time Twist.

Thank you for informing me of this.

 

[RT-55J]

I've been busy posting it everywhere I can since I saw it earlier today.

 

[Issun]

Deltarune

Didn't Toby Fox recently tweet that his compy crapped out and wiped out the code, basically killing the game, or was that a joke?

 

[RT-55J]

I would have to assume that's a joke.

EDIT: based on the holiday newsletter the game is still in progress, despite some engine-related snafus.

 

[WildcatJF]

I recorded mine:

 

[Patrick]

Retro consoles are reaching a power/price sweetspot where you can play Skies of Arcadia on a system that costs less than a theoretical HD version would cost. So, it’s not as big of a deal as it used to be. But I’d still be happy to see it.

 

[Violentvixen]

Ring Fit Adventure 2 will be teased, but not released.

I wanted this last year and will continue to hope for 2025.

EDIT: based on the holiday newsletter the game is still in progress, despite some engine-related snafus.

Nice! That all seems like solid progress so I'll predict Deltarune 3 and 4 for 2025.

I can't decide if I think Animal Crossing will be announced next year or released next year. I'm going to go with released but am not strongly convinced either way honestly.

Edit: I also think my 2024 prediction is still valid for 2025:

Farming games continue to rise as a genre as our world burns and nothing green is left

 

[BEAT]

WORK IN PROGRESS I'LL ADD MORE TOMORROW.

SWITCH 2 WILL BE THE SWITCH 2. They won't call it the Switch 2 but it will be in every possible way, the switch 2. We already know it will play switch games and be slightly more powerful than a PS4. The only question is when they will put up the new fancy video showing off the new Mario platformer and the new franchise that everyone will go "oh that looks neat" but not buy or play. You know, like Arms.

THERE WILL NOT BE A NEW ZELDA ANNOUNCED. Breath of the wild was only released on the Wiiu as a formality and Tears of the Kingdom barely made the switch's last full year. I don't think they're gonna put out another Echos of Wisdom style "Smaller zelda" but I don't think they're gonna show off the next big thing until they're sure they can deliver.

GTA6 WILL SELL A LOT. Unless it gets delayed, but WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF THAT?!?!?! (Pretty high actually.)

METROID PRIME 4 WILL BE A GREAT EXAMPLE OF WHY NOTHING GOOD COMES OUT OF 10 YEAR DEV CYCLES. There are only so many years you can spend making sure every model looks fantastic in your lighting engine. Metroid Prime 4 will be a grim testament to the abject failure of multiple management teams, likely resulting from the lack of a core idea and identity well into the 2020s. The game might be good, but like The Last Guardian and Duke Nukem Forever before it, It won't be the brilliant perfect vision of a team that would accept nothing but absolute perfection. It'll be what a bunch of exhausted devs finally deemed shippable after watching literal years of hard work get thrown away repeatedly on a nightmare project that refused to die. And when It finally does ship, the group consensus will be "It's okay but it's not metroid Prime 1."

SEGA'S SUPERGAME WILL CONTINUE TO MAKE ME SAD. It's possible that when they called it a live service they meant it'll have a high score leaderboard but somehow I doubt it. They already erased a bunch of true classics from all digital storefronts, and the thing that's supposedly cooking to replace them... won't. Yeah that's a good way to put it. It just won't.

SQUARE WILL TEASE THE NEXT BIG THING FOR SQUARE NERDS. I'm not sure if it'll be Final Fantasy 17 or kingdom hearts 4, but it'll be SOMETHING.

 

[Bongo]

METROID PRIME 4 WILL BE A GREAT EXAMPLE OF WHY NOTHING GOOD COMES OUT OF 10 YEAR DEV CYCLES. There are only so many years you can spend making sure every model looks fantastic in your lighting engine. Metroid Prime 4 will be a grim testament to the abject failure of multiple management teams, likely resulting from the lack of a core idea and identity well into the 2020s. The game might be good, but like The Last Guardian and Duke Nukem Forever before it, It won't be the brilliant perfect vision of a team that would accept nothing but absolute perfection. It'll be what a bunch of exhausted devs finally deemed shippable after watching literal years of hard work get thrown away repeatedly on a nightmare project that refused to die. And when It finally does ship, the group consensus will be "It's okay but it's not metroid Prime 1."

I want to save you from a bad prediction here. Metroid Prime 4 has had a longish but well-precedented five-year development cycle, not a disastrous ten-year one. The original developers from the time of the 2017 announcement were completely shitcanned from the project and nothing was retained except the title when they started over on a different continent.

 

[Sarge]

I only weighed in on a single thing last year and got it wrong, so... yeah.

Anyway, I'll take the gimme, regardless. Switch 2 releases in the first half of the year.

I also think there will be a wider gap between docked and portable performance - some of the power ratings seem to indicate they may run it quite a bit faster when docked, especially when trying to hit 4K output resolutions. Still think the power level will be PS4-ish, probably a bit weaker than the Steam Deck but compensated for by DLSS.

Tend to agree with @BEAT that Metroid Prime 4 will arrive, and it will disappoint. Lest we forget, everything past the original has disappointed in one way or another.

Capcom gon' bring back Breath of Fire in some capacity. They will NOT bring back Gargoyle's Quest or Bionic Commando, and I will curse them for it.

Reverse jinx - there will be no Skies of Arcadia HD.

Sega's revival of their older properties will only hit on two of them. The others will be meh.

Natsume will find another game to remaster, but hopefully to better effect than Shadow of the Ninja. (Yes, I didn't care as much for it, sue me.)

There's always a really weird game we don't see coming that gets a re-release, so... how about the Kid Niki games (both arcade and NES)?

Nintendo has a Mario title available in the launch window for Switch 2. It will be a Odyssey-styled game.

Hoping beyond hope that Square Enix brings Final Fantasy back to its roots. (They won't.)

Konami bungles some sort of revival of their properties again.

 

[Olli]

* Hades 2 will barely make a 1.0 release, or downright get pushed into early 2026. Fans will largely not care, as they're already playing the early access version on a level where they can win challenge runs one hand tied behind their back.
* Nintendo puts out some weird multiplayer thing a la F-Zero 99, but this time it's even more experimental and it'll be great. Metroid 99, you heard it here first.
* GTA 6 will cause a non-trivial moral panic, partly because it will sell so much that it will feature prominently in mainstream news.
* Surprise Microsoft announcement; either new hardware or they get out of the hardware game entirely
* Some small but addictive puzzle game sweeps the casual gaming world by storm
* Three major TV series based on previously untapped video game IP launch, all gain at least decent critical reception
* Three major films based on video game IP released, only one of them is any good
* Some old movie gets an unexpected video game treatment. Let's say Commando. Or Dirty Dancing.

 

[Voncaster]

Monster Hunter Wilds will be my GOTY. I don't see Capcom dropping the ball on this. I'm here for it. Outside of GTA 6, any AAA game released in March has been sent to die as MHW will occupy a lot of gamers time space.

I predict this every year so might as well be wrong again: Square Enix will remake Parasite Eve. (I truthfully think FF Tactics or an Chrono Trigger are more likely).

***More later***

 

[Violentvixen]

Nintendo puts out some weird multiplayer thing a la F-Zero 99, but this time it's even more experimental and it'll be great. Metroid 99, you heard it here first.

Oooh yeah, surprise something 99 is a good one

 

[Baudshaw]

A funny idea would be something like Chess 64. Or maybe Clubhouse Games 51

 

[Sarcasmorator]

-Switch 2 will be $399.
-Silksong stealth drops
-Super Mario Galaxy 2 HD a Switch 2 exclusive
-Metroid Prime 2 and/or 3 HD announced
-New Zelda announced for Switch 2
-TLOU 3 details revealed after TLOU S2 starts earning plaudits and awards
-Elden Ring: Nightreign gets medium reviews but is a huge success
-Live service games decline further aside from the few outliers. Publisher love affair with them cools
-Dust begins settling from huge layoff flurries of 2023 and 2024; fewer big games announced for 2026. Studios struggle to hire as more and more laid-off devs move to different careers
-More layoffs also, of course
-Humble Bundle becomes a complete shell of its former self, pitching AI slop more and more often.
-Humble Choice offerings drop to like 6 games a month before the subscription service is ended in September
-Subscription services in general get more expensive with worse offerings
-I feel it. This is the year. Vagrant Story II

Quote Reply

 

[lincolnic]

Studios struggle to hire as more and more laid-off devs move to different careers

I don't think hiring will be the issue here. Every time my team has posted an opening in the past four years, we've gotten over a thousand responses, and from what I've heard from friends at other studios it's like this pretty much everywhere. There will always be people -- especially young people -- who want to work in their "dream job", even if it's a very unstable one.

My experience is anecdotal of course, but I would grimly predict that studios will have no problem hiring people no matter how many layoffs there are.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Yeah, the passion pool (and passion tax) will continue to be a thing in game dev. The ability to do something you love will always motivate people, especially younger ones. But it's still a brain drain because layoffs + having a mortgage and moving to higher-paid jobs elsewhere in tech churn people with experience out of game dev from both directions.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

For an example of that brain drain, look at the state of journalism, also an industry that banked on passion and then started laying everyone off and shutting everything down.

Maybe they won't struggle to hire, but... things will suffer.

 

[4-So]

-Nintendo reveals something no one was expecting for the 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros.
-A new 3D Mario is available on Switch 2 within the first six months of launch
-Mario Kart 9 is announced, released in time for the holidays
-Ubisoft continues to implode and is forced to sell off one its major franchises. Microsoft will try to buy it. (The franchise, not Ubisoft. Although...)
-We will finally see a trailer for Dragon Quest 12
-Speaking of Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest Builders 3, y'all
-Teaser trailer for Super Mario Bros. 2 movie before year end
-Xenoblade Chronicles 4 announcement. 2026 release.
-Capcom will finally remember classic Mega Man but whatever is announced will be disappointing