The 13 biggest video game news stories of 2023 – from GTA 6 to Switch 2

Baldurfield was just one of this year’s big stories (Picture: Larian Studios/Bethesda Game Studios)

2023 has been a year to remember, from the unexpected success of Baldur’s Gate 3 to the unexpected cancellation of The Last Of Us Online.

It’s very difficult to know what the final reputation of 2023 will end up being. On the one hand it saw the release of an unusually large number of classic games and on the other it saw turmoil within the industry that may only get worse in the new year.

It wasn’t just the usual console war battling, between Sony and Microsoft, but an industry wide wave of job losses that has very much taken the edge of what otherwise would have been a celebratory year.

Many of these issues and events will continue to make headlines well into 2024 but for now this is a summary of the biggest video game news stories of the last 12 months and how they will affect you.

1. The deal of the century

Arguably the biggest news of the year was that Microsoft finally got the go ahead to buy Activision Blizzard. But while that drove many of the year’s headlines it’s so far had next to no practical effect on ordinary gamers, with the first impact set to be when Activision Blizzard games hit Game Pass in 2024.

How important this will be to Xbox’s future remains a topic of some contention, as while Microsoft’s pretence that it would leave the games industry if Game Pass numbers didn’t pick up was no doubt an exaggeration – as was most things they said during the legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission – subscription numbers have plateaued for both Microsoft and Sony during 2023 and it’s not clear if even free Call Of Duty will change that.

Microsoft has claimed that the real reason it bought Activision Blizzard was to get control of Candy Crush Saga maker King, although they’ve never made clear any specific plans for the studio or mobile in general so, again, it’s difficult to tell whether that’s bluster or true intention.

What is certain is that after spending $69 billion on Activision Blizzard they are now the biggest video games publisher outside of China, and yet with hardware sales still in the doldrums it’s unclear how they’re going to leverage that fact, other than that sweet Call Of Duty revenue.

2. Sony the recluse

2023 was the year that made you really wonder about the people in charge of the video games industry, literally in the case of Sony as PlayStation boss Jim Ryan announced in September that he was leaving the company. 2023 wasn’t much of a victory lap for him though, as PlayStation failed to announce any substantial new games, only released one major first party title (Spider-Man 2), and ruined their own plans to focus on first party games.

For a time, some thought the strange veil of silence might have something to do with the Activision Blizzard merger but when that was resolved Sony still remained stoically silent. It was strange as not only do they obviously have many games in development but at the same time the PlayStation 5 was selling by the bucket load. Sony announced in June that the stock shortages were officially over and set themselves on course to sell a record-breaking 25 million consoles by the end of this year.

Not only did Sony promise live service games that never materialised but they said they were going to expand into more genres, like shooters and role-players… and that never happened either. In contrast to Microsoft’s slickly presented Xbox Game Showcase, Sony’s summer event was a big bag of nothing and they just didn’t seem to care.

Nothing seems to add up. The PlayStation 5 couldn’t be selling better and yet Sony couldn’t be making less effort to announce new games and interact with its customers. Are they doing it on purpose or have their schedules suddenly, inexplicably ground to a halt? Is there really a civil war going on behind the scenes, that has already claimed two top execs? We never found out in 2023 and we may not find out next year either.

The Switch 2 – lots of rumours but no facts (Picture: Salvo Lo Cascio and Riccardo Cambò Breccia)

3. Nintendo Switch 2 is coming… eventually

If you were dealing with any other company, it’d be blindingly obvious that the Switch 2 is going to be released somewhere at the end of 2024 and that an official announcement is probably coming sometime before the midpoint of the year. But because it’s Nintendo, and because the original Switch is still selling stubbornly well, it’s wise not to make any assumptions.

There have been believable leaks, from everyone from component suppliers to Activision, and earlier in the year Nintendo were happy to drop little teases about a ‘new platform’ and hints at future backwards compatibility.

The rumours about the Switch 2 having been shown off to developers at Gamescom in August seemed to be a step too far though and, unusually, Nintendo went out of its way to deny the rumour or any suggestion that a new console is imminent.

They were probably just trying to avoid anyone holding back from buying a Switch 1 at Christmas, but it underlines how you can’t really make any assumptions about Nintendo, and what they’re planning with their next console.

4. World’s worst hardware launch

Nothing underlines Sony’s odd behaviour this year more than the absolutely bizarre way they treated the PlayStation VR2. Launched in February at an eye-watering £529.99, Sony released Horizon Call Of The Mountain alongside it and… failed to announce, let alone release, a single other VR game all year.

The headset is excellent, and there has been decent third party support for it, but Sony has acted as if it doesn’t exist, or that they were somehow coerced into releasing it. The only time they spoke about it in public was to deny rumours that it had underperformed, but it would hardly be surprising if it had.

To be fair, the whole VR industry struggled in 2023, due to the high cost of the headsets, despite the Meta Quest 3 also being a very nice bit of kit. But Sony didn’t learn their lesson and thanks to the PlayStation Portal handheld and the Slim model of the PlayStation 5 they somehow ended up releasing more new hardware this year than new first party games.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie – success at last (pic: Universal Pictures)

5. Hollywood Superstars

Just as Super Mario Bros. in 1993 was the first live action adaptation of a video game it seems fitting that this year’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie should be the first to become a bone fide global smash. The second biggest movie of the year, just behind Barbie, it certainly wasn’t the best film of 2023, but it was an authentic recreation of the games and inoffensive fun for all ages.

It also happened to hit the same year that The Last Of Us proved that serious live action adaptations could also be a thing. You might argue that Naughty Dog’s game is something of a special case, being half-movie before you even start the adaptation, but it’s still an important milestone – and a really good miniseries, whether you know its origins or not.

What’s curious though is that so far Hollywood has showed an unusual amount of restraint and the flood of wannabe tie-ins has so far failed to materialise. There was the inevitable announcement of a Zelda movie but beyond that nothing else new. Or at least not yet.

Surprisingly, it’s still unclear if there’s going to be a The Last Of Us Part 3 video game, although the cancellation of The Last Of Us Online will now make it easier for Naughty Dog to have multiple major projects on the go at once.

6. Baldurfield and a tale of two epics

Barbenheimer was the biggest thing at the box office this year but while attempts to make Baldurfield the video game equivalent never quite worked (because Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t arrive on Xbox until early December) Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 were two of the year’s most talked about games, for better and worse.

They also both launched without reviews, Baldur’s Gate 3 apparently because the game was only finished at the last minute but Starfield because Bethesda purposefully withheld copies from some outlets it deemed likely to give the game an unflattering review. In the end it seems they should’ve widened their net, as while the game wasn’t a disaster it certainly wasn’t the instant classic that Microsoft had obviously been hoping for.

Baldur’s Gate 3 was the opposite though and while those that knew the developer’s previous work on Divinity: Original Sin (or had simply played Baldur’s Gate 3 in early access) were anticipating greatness it took the majority of gamers by surprise, both in terms of its quality and its content – include copious amounts of sex scenes, one famously featuring someone that can turn into a bear.

The game has already been picking up multiple Game of the Year awards and remains one of the most played games on Steam – easily eclipsing Starfield, which got overtaken by Bethesda’s decade-old Skyrim within a few weeks.

Do we really need a PS5 Pro? (Picture: Concept Creator)

7. PS5: too much of a good thing

Not only did Sony release a bewildering amount of, arguably unnecessary, new hardware this year but there were also endless rumours of them planning a PS5 Pro for next year. No two rumours seem to agree on its specs but at this point there seems little question that it’s on its way and will likely be out for next Christmas.

We are now three years into the current generation so there’ve even been the first stirrings about the PlayStation 6, especially after Microsoft started talking about its plans, and its assumptions about Sony’s, during its Activision Blizzard court case.

And while there was hardly any talk of an Xbox Series X Pro, or whatever it might be called, there were whispers of some kind of new Xbox hardware, with Microsoft revealing that it expects both the PlayStation 6 and Xbox Series X2 out by 2028.

In fact, thanks to Microsoft accidentally making a host of private documents public during its Activision Blizzard court case, we heard about all sorts of future plans, including new consoles, controllers, and some sort of Switch style hybrid. Microsoft tried to claim they were old, outdated plans but why would it use those in a court case it desperately wanted to win? Only time will tell.

8. Money can’t buy you love

As you’d expect, many of these stories are interconnected and while the Activision Blizzard acquisition did eventually go Microsoft’s way that’s about the only thing that did work out for them this year. No matter how good 2023 was or wasn’t, overall, it is curious that Microsoft and Sony contributed very little that was positive.

Microsoft has spent well over $80 billion on buying new developers in the last few years and they’re still yet to see any benefit from it in terms of hit games or increased hardware sales. Even Game Pass subscriptions seem to have stalled, although that’s a problem shared by Sony and PS Plus.

Sales of the Xbox actually decreased following the launch of Starfield, rather than increasing, and while its critical response wasn’t disastrous the one for Redfall certainly was. Forza Motorsport seemed to make little impact, compared to the more popular Forza Horizon, and only the digital-only Hi-Fi Rush was universally loved.

The Xbox Game Showcase did go very well though and at that point you could picture Xbox as the industry leader it always aspired to be, but only a few months later it was forced to make the best of not just the Starfield launch but the least acclaimed Call Of Duty ever – just as the franchise came under their direct control.

In November one exec started talking about a ‘change of strategy’ and hinting about Game Pass on PlayStation and Switch, igniting talk of Microsoft effectively going third party. Although boss Phil Spencer quickly refuted that idea, only to leave the future of Xbox more uncertain than ever.

GTA 6 – at least the trailer didn’t disappoint (Picture: Rockstar Games)

9. The reality of GTA 6

Every fan was hoping for a reveal of Grand Theft Auto 6 in 2023 and while Rockstar Games left it until the last minute the first trailer was finally released and it did not disappoint.

It seemed to confirm all the previously leaked rumours, including a Bonnie and Clyde style pair of protagonists and a setting of Vice City. The trailer offered next to no concrete details, but the graphics were so astonishingly good – better than most dared hope – that it didn’t seem to matter.

Within 24 hours it had more than 50 million views and is already over 150 million. The only downside was that the release date was confirmed as 2025, which immediately had fans searching for clues as to when exactly – with a secret T-shirt code, pointing at April 1, being a favourite. There’s no way of knowing if that’s accurate but you can bet that Trailer 2 in 2024 is going to turn up the hype even higher.

10. Mercy killing

This wasn’t a big news story in the sense that anyone was surprised to hear it, but the official end of E3 was definitely the end of an era. For years there’s been half-hearted attempts to get it going again, and even as multiple companies pulled out of the planned 2023 event there was still talk of it coming back next year in a completely different form.

In December though the plug was finally pulled and everyone admitted that E3 was never coming back. It’s absence will be filled with publishers-specific online events but the problem there is that the games themselves are not available for hands-on preview and developers never put themselves up for serious interview anymore.

So the death of E3 means that new games are being released with increasingly little information available about them, and the creators and execs at the heart of the industry are no longer getting properly interrogated. Which is, of course, exactly how they’d prefer it.

The Last Of Us Online – no longer a thing (Picture: Sony)

11. The live service of us

The games industry loves a good bandwagon to jump on – even though it always ends up the same, with only a handful of companies doing well out of a new fad. Publishers have been falling over themselves to make their own live service games, equivalents of Destiny 2 or Rainbow Six Siege, but it already seems as if the concept has peaked.

That’s a problem for Sony, who bet the farm on the whole idea, promising 10 or more live service games by 2026, none of which it’s shown any gameplay for yet. More damningly, it’s been forced to cancel The Last Of Us Online, which would presumably have been the spearhead of its new direction and delay six others.

Naughty Dog’s rather churlish sounding cancellation announcement implies they’re none to enamoured with the idea of live service games in general and as we’ve explored elsewhere on this page there’re hints of considerable discount within Sony as a whole.

The wider question is whether the rest of the games industry has given up on the idea, or at least accepted that it’s no longer a guaranteed success. Although even if they have they’ll be some other get rich quick concept next year, which everyone will insist they waste their time and money on instead.

12. Industry losses

A lot of people are keen to describe 2023 as one of the best years ever for video games but it’s certainly not if you’re a game developer, as you would’ve been constantly looking over your shoulder, worried that you’re going to be made redundant.

As we’ve explored at length, over 9,000 industry jobs have been lost this year, from indie publishers like Team17 to the famous developers like 343 Industries, Naughty Dog, Epic Games, and Bungie. The worst affected are those that had the misfortune to be bought by Embracer Group but there’s barely a games company in the West that hasn’t been affected.

The core of the problem is companies taking on too many new staff following the increased demand for games during the pandemic, and not realising that demand would fall back down once it was over, but it’s a lot more complicated than that, especially with many firms starting to make use of AI for both art and scripts.

Morale at many studios is currently rock bottom and that alone is going to have a major negative effect on future games. What’s worse is that there’s no sign that the downsizing is over and these problems are certain to continue into 2024, while the only ones unaffected are the execs that made all the bad decisions in the first place.

More: Trending

13. Wake up call

We had thought this would be only a list of the 12 biggest news stories but in the last week before Christmas there came news that a rumoured cyberattack on Spider-Man 2 developer Insomniac Games was real and that, after they refused to pay a ransom, all their data was shared publicly online.

And by all we mean details of future games, screenshots and videos, sensitive business documents, employee details, and even a playable version of the new Wolverine game. Obviously that’s terrible news for all involved (hopefully including the hackers if Sony ever gets hold of them) and only serves to make a miserable year for developers even worse – even if Insomniac were grateful for all the support from other companies.

Email [email protected], leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter.

MORE : Video Games Top 20 of 2023 – the best games of the year according to Metro

MORE : World’s biggest games company loses $40 billion as new Chinese laws hit

MORE : Wolverine PS5 game is not cancelled confirms Insomniac

Follow Metro Gaming on Twitter and email us at [email protected]

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

2023 has been a year to remember, from the unexpected success of Baldur’s Gate 3 to the unexpected cancellation of The Last Of Us Online.