Predicting the gaming trends for 2025 starts with reflecting on what's happened in 2024. After another tumultuous year of layoffs and studio closures, many folks in the games industry will be staggering into 2025 with an understandable sense of anxiety. As while Epic Games has had a good year with Unreal Engine 5 and Nintendo continues to buck the trends, many studios have suffered.
But there are some potential bright spots ahead. The launch of Nintendo Switch 2 (read our Switch 2 rumours feature for the latest info), the follow-up to the almighty Switch handheld, is sure to buoy the industry, as will the juggernaut that is GTA 6, even if it swallows attention from other titles like a black hole sucking in light.
Yet there’s still that lingering sense of unease. Can new live-service games succeed in the market, given the disaster of Concord? Will generative AI improve games, or make things worse? Will Microsoft's Game Pass succeed, or are subscription services on the way out? In the midst of all this uncertainty, it’s perhaps comforting that games with relatively simple, old-school design are cutting through, like the excellent Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2 and Still Wakes The Deep, indicating that bigger, more beautiful and more complicated worlds aren’t necessarily better, or even what players particularly want.
The rise of 'AAA-lite' games, advances in AI for indie development, more cross-platform and cross-media games, as well perhaps a relaunch of classic IP as publishers play on nostalgia in the wake of Silent Hill 2: Remake's success, could all point to a better, more balanced year for games and indies.
Game design trends 2025: our predictions
In light of all that, here are ten gaming trends and predictions to look out for in 2025. These include new launches, advances in tech, new ways of working and more.
1. Nintendo Switch launches
Anticipation is mounting for the follow-up to Nintendo’s mega-hit Switch console, which has sold more than 146 million units since its release in March 2017. Nintendo has said that an announcement on Switch 2, or whatever it ends up being called, will be made by the end of March 2025 at the latest, and we already know it will be backwards compatible with the Switch.
Will Nintendo play it safe by essentially making another Switch with beefier specs and a better screen? Or will Nintendo follow past precedent by introducing some kind of new hardware gimmick? My money’s on some kind of dual-screen setup, toying with our love and nostalgia for Nintendo DS, but Nintendo does like to surprise us. Remember that alarm clock?
What seems almost certain is that we’ll get a new 3D Mario, probably as a launch title, since it’s been seven whole years since the last one, Super Mario Odyssey. And if we’re lucky, Metroid Prime 4 Beyond might make its long-awaited debut alongside the new console, ever since being teased at a Nintendo Direct earlier this year.
2. Live service games out of favour
Sony's live service shooter Concord was the biggest video-game flop of 2024, shut down just two weeks after its launch in August as a result of catastrophically low player counts. Sony later shuttered the game’s creator, Firewalk Studios, having only bought the studio in 2023.
Earlier in the year, Warner Bros.’ Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League made a similarly disappointing debut, showing that even licensed properties can struggle in vain to attract players away from well-established live-service titles such as Fortnite and GTAV.
These high-profile failures are likely to make big publishers think twice about launching new live-service titles in 2025. At Sony, as reported in sister site Games Radar, The Last of Us Online has already been cancelled, but reportedly there’s still a Horizon MMO in the works: it remains to be seen whether it will live to see the light of day, given the Concord debacle.
Sony also has at least two other live-service games lined up, currently without a firm release date: Marathon from Bungie, developer of Destiny 2 (read our deep dive into making the The Final Shape expansion), and Fairgame$ from Jade Raymond’s Haven Studios. Will they release in 2025? And can they fare any better?
Concord has shown how difficult it is to launch new IP in the live-service space, but one game could potentially buck the trend: early feedback on Valve’s Deadlock has been positive from sister games site PCGamer, and there’s every chance it could burst out of beta in 2025.
3. Xbox Game Pass surges, but can it last?
Microsoft reportedly had some lengthy internal debates (according to The Verge) about whether to put Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on Game Pass. Since the purchase of Activision Blizzard, Call of Duty has become Microsoft’s jewel in the crown, but shoving the new CoD game onto Microsoft’s subscription service would naturally mean sacrificing some hefty day-one sales on Xbox. The fact that it happened shows Microsoft is committed to making Game Pass succeed.
Circana reported that Game Pass subscriptions surged on the release of Black Ops 6, but the big question is whether these new subscribers will stick around for the long haul. Expect to see older Call of Duty games being drip fed onto Game Pass over the next 12 months to keep these new subscribers interested.
Microsoft has a lot coming to, and on, Game Pass, including the new Indiana Jones and the Golden Circle blockbuster, Stalker 2 and in 2025 Avowed from respected RPG team Obsidian Entertainment is come to the service, alongside Fable, DOOM: The Dark Ages and Gears of War E-Day.
At the same time, Microsoft is pushing Game Pass onto as many devices as possible, including Samsung TVs and Amazon Fire Stick, backed by the confusing ‘This is an Xbox’ ad campaign. There's a clear strategy to move beyond hardware and release games across platforms, something other publishers are also looking into, including Sony with its PlayStation Plus subscription.
But if subscriber numbers falter in 2025, this could signal the end of the Game Pass experiment: if Call of Duty can’t make subscribers stick around, then surely nothing can.
4. A quiet year for VR hardware… maybe
The past two years have seen the release of a plethora of big-hitter VR and AR devices, including PSVR2, Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 (all featured in our best VR headsets roundup).
But 2025 seems to be a bit quieter on the new hardware front. "We're unlikely to see Apple's next headset this year, though reports on the specific timeline are conflicted," says Henry Stockdale, staff writer at UploadVR. "Samsung's upcoming Android XR headset is also on the way, but that's reportedly been delayed,” he adds, meaning we’re increasingly unlikely to see it in 2025.
But there’s an outside chance that Valve might spring a surprise. “We've recently seen controller models emerge on SteamVR for the rumoured Valve Deckard,” Henry says, referring to Valve’s long-in-gestation follow up to its Index VR headset from 2019. “Knowing Valve though, whether that's actually coming soon is anyone's guess.”
Although Apple Vision Pro 2 might be a long way off, there’s a chance we could see a cheaper version of the Apple Vision headset by the end of the year, which could give Meta a headache, unless Quest 4 is incoming.
5. Generative AI NPCs arrive
The idea of creating generative-AI powered non-player characters (NPCs) has captivated some, who see it as a way to generate realistic, expansive conversations in place of characters that default to the same repeating phrases. Others, meanwhile, like Inkle’s Jon Ingold, merely regard it as a way of “creating an unworkable design purely to employ AI”.
Whatever your viewpoint, we will start to see generative-AI powered NPCs emerge in 2025, such as the antagonist of Meaning Machine’s Dead Meat, a game that sees you posing questions to a large language model-powered suspect in an attempt to extract a murder confession.
We might also start to see the first NPCs made using Nvidia ACE, which is now available as a plugin for Unreal Engine 5. We've already got to test Nvidia's character AI for games and it's actually remarkable, but also fallible and has revealed good writers will be in demand even with gen AI characters.
Other major developers are experimenting with gen AI for game design and NPCs, ahead of them all seems to be Ubisoft, that could have a game out in 2025 which makes use of Nvidia Audio2Face AI, to create its own NEO NPC, as well as other AI apps. Read 'How Ubisoft’s New generative AI prototype changes the narrative for NPCs' for an insight.
6. GTA 6 releases, everyone loves it
Since its release in 2013, GTA V has sold well over 200 million copies, and the launch of GTA 6 is set to upend all sales records, such is the demand for a sequel. Indeed, the announcement that Grand Theft Auto 6 would launch in 2025 was so momentous that it broke through the navel-gazing world of video games and into the world at large, making headlines on the BBC and other mainstream news channels.
Accordingly, although GTA 6 is likely to lift the overall revenue of the games industry, its debut will be devastating for any games released in its wake. "No one will play anything else for six months after it," says Mike Rose, head of indie publisher No More Robots. "In the weeks, months after GTA 6 comes out, some people will never buy a game ever again. They'll play this game, and that will be it: it will become their Roblox."
7. Indie games get ambitious
Sam Barlow, founder of Immortality maker Half Mermaid Productions, has noted the trend for more ambitious, open-world indie games like Sable and Tchia over the past few years, with “people stepping out of the assumptions around pixel art and two-dimensional things into more full-bodied 3D experiences”.
He thinks this trend will continue in 2025, with indie developers using engines like Unreal Engine 5 and Unity 6 to streamline many processes and create bigger worlds rather than making the prettiest games possible. "The cool thing with indies is, if you have more powerful machines and engines, it's not about maxing them out, it's just you can make things quicker".
Indie auteur Sam Barlow isn't the first developer to say this, when we spoke with Anna Hollinrake about making her first game as an indie dev, the colourful open-world narrative game Crescent County, she revealed the move to Unreal Engine 5 made the larger world design, for a small team, possible. "We actually ended up making it too big," she told us.
8. New mobile game stores launch
The EU Digital Markets Act has paved the way for rival app stores to come to iOS, and the Epic Game Store has already launched on Apple devices. “Unfortunately very few people seem to have noticed,” says Neil Long, founder of MobileGamer.biz, “and I’m not all that confident that even the promise of regular free games, like Epic offers through its PC store, will help.”
Neil thinks that the monster hit Fortnite isn’t enough to tempt most people away from Apple’s own App Store, or Google’s equivalent. “Epic needs more killer content to get people to use its stores and make it clear why people should bother when the default iOS and Android stores do a solid job,” he says.
Microsoft is also likely to launch its own app store in 2025. But Neil points out that the Redmond giant’s mobile strategy has been “all over the place”, so he isn’t confident that either Epic or Microsoft can attract sufficient customer numbers, “even though the market desperately needs new contenders to rein in Apple and Google, who are utterly dominant.”
We've seen Apple itself push new mobile hardware to gamers, including seeing more Triple-A game releases on iPad, such Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage and Resident Evil 4 for iPhone. The mobile space is set to grow and become more important in 2025, and we've already seen both Unity and Unreal Engine 5.5 promote new tools for development on mobile platforms.
9. The rise of in-real-life gaming
There's a convergence happening with technology, as Unreal Engine and Unity become as useful outside of game development as within. We've seen in the past how Unreal us used to create immersive live experiences, such as Frameless in London that puts you into classic works of art and its use in filmmaking to drive LED Volume stages, the kind used by ILM for Star Wars.
Just this month Felix & Paul Studios has announced a new 20,000-Square-Foot 'Interstellar Arc' mixed reality experience that will launch in Las Vegas in 2025 to rival the Las Vegas Sphere for tech and spectacle.
This could lead to more virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality events launching in 2025, particularly as publishers look to leverage brands in new ways. Already an early contender to take your money, at least in the UK, is the upcoming Pac-Man Live experience that uses similar immersive tech as an Unreal Volume to out players into the Pac-Man maze as they're chased by augmented reality ghosts.
Expect more immersive events in 2025 as gaming and game design evolves from the screen and into real life in new ways, especially with advances in AI like the Move AI's mocap 'Live' system that can capture movement and put it into scenes on a screen in real time.
10. AA game design is back
Sam Barlow notes that some of the biggest hits of the past year have relied on tried and tested design elements. “I mean, Metaphor: ReFantazio is pretty much literally a PS2 game in the way it’s set up,” he says, calling it “an extremely archaic RPG design” that is “extremely confident and polished in what it's doing”.
He gives Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl as another example. “They're not even necessarily embracing a lot of the technical progress that's been made,” he says of the game that has dominated his recent playing time.
“Stalker 2 is a 2000s PC game: it doesn't have cool, emergent physics, all the stuff that Zelda: Breath of the Wild did to innovate open world. It's not doing any of that. It's them going, ‘What if we made a 2000s PC game, but we can do 100 times as many trees?’.”
Similarly, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, which shot past 4.5 million sales in a month is an old-fashioned Xbox 360-style shooter that simply refines classic ideas and reworks them for new players. Its success, and that of other old-school new releases, shows that players seem happy to embrace simpler game design, perhaps even as a form of nostalgia. It’s likely other studios will take note and follow suit in 2025.
The wake of team downsizing and studio closures, and soaring development costs, combined with 'smaller' games performing well in 2024, a big game design trend for 2025 will see the return of well-made, polished, smaller-scale games made on sustainable budgets with a blend of AAA ambition and indie sensibilities.
Likewise, publishers will look at the buzz around brand revivals like Silent Hill 2, Dragon Quest III HD-2D and Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and want to replicate those successes. We already have Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Donkey Kong Country Returns HD and The Thing Remastered from remaster specials Nightdive Studios, so expect something special from Sony in particular.
Game design trends 2025: outside the box
While it's clear Nintendo Switch 2, generative AI, new tools for Unreal Engine 5, the rise of indies and more will happen in 2025, there are some outside chances of other things happening in video games. Below are some 'outside the box' things that may come to pass.
- Sony announces PSP 2 While the PS Portal is gaining popularity, it's no Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck competitor. Sony has made noises recently that a new PlayStation handheld is in development, according to a report in Bloomberg, and if so, a announcement could come in 2025.
- PlayStation 6 design teased More Sony rumours, but now PlayStation 5 Pro is released it feels like a PS6 rumours could get solidified. Sony likes to get in early with tech specs for new hardware, so a GDC 2025 tease could be on the cards, if only to announce partnerships and ideas.
- Blockchain gaming is a thing We've heard how blockchain gaming is going to be a trend for two years, but with Ubisoft quietly releasing NFT game Champions Tactics, it seems a reality now. Expect more toe-dips into this crypt pool in 2025.
- Retro game continues to grow As gamers get older and hacker for the past, retro gaming will grow even more, with services like Antstream Arcade pioneering new cloud-based ways of playing classic games.
- Everyone's a creator 2025 could be the year we see game design embrace the 'metaverse' and hand the keys of content creation to gamers. Unreal Editor for Fortnite and Roblox have been doing this, with the door opened ajar, but games like Everywhere from Build A Rocket Boy aim to enable players to create from scratch, not simply remix existing assets (though you can do that also).
