2024: The Dead Game Review
Games that shutdown, studios that closed, and all the apologies made along the way
One word I kept seeing in the YouTube chat for The Game Awards 2024 was “slop.” Stalcraft X Operations was more live service slop. Dungeon & Fighter: Arad was more anime slop. A term previously reserved for soulless AI-generated crap was now being used to make snap judgements about upcoming games, quickly sorting them into the competing piles of “looks cool” and “who cares.”
This isn’t altogether new or even unfair, but it does feel in part like a reaction to the increasing unwieldiness of what it means to follow, play, and care about video games. Over 19,000 games were released on Steam last year, according to SteamDB. That’s nearly six times more than a decade ago. Thousands of those games are things almost nobody played but many of them did find an audience.
Over 900 of the games that came to Steam in 2024 had an 85 percent user rating or above. Song of Conquest, an excellent strategy RPG in the mold of Heroes of Might and Magic, was one that fell just shy of that, ranked 1,014th user ratings. No one can keep up with that. The best you can do is pick a spot, dip your toe in, and feel the river rush past.
But the river metaphor suggests the games come and go. Instead, they hang around for longer and longer, especially when it comes to big-budget blockbusters and live service hits. Each new success story—Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate III, Helldivers 2—gets added to a growing list of perennial best-sellers and most-played games.
Steam’s long-tail, meanwhile, offers a labyrinth of genre tags and recommendation queues to load up your back catalog with any time there’s a big sale. Only 15 percent of all time spent on Valve’s storefront last year was in new games. The deluge is less overwhelming on consoles, but even more pronounced relative to its cyclical past. Roughly 60 percent of playtime in 2023 was spent in games that had come out in 2017 or earlier.
This is what sticks out to me the most in lists of top charting games. Nearly half of the best-selling boxed games in 2024 did not come out in 2024. The weekly active user reports are dominated by annual franchises and a handful of forever games like Fortnite and Rainbow Six Siege. Compare that to 2019 when when only five of the top-selling games that year had come out in a previous one.
And yet there are more great games than ever. Annual top-10 lists have been expanded to top-50s. 2024 had 155 games with an 80 or higher on Metacritic, two more than 2023, one of the best years ever for new releases. Everyone’s backlog is only ever growing. It’s a wonder we play anything new at all.
At the same time the supply of games is exploding, the traditional tools for funneling attention to them have collapsed. Digital games media is in free fall. YouTube is an algorithmic cesspool. Twitch has faded. Twitter is a mess. And even the largest publishers promoting the biggest franchises seem like they’re just rolling the dice, as evidenced by Suicide Squad, Star Wars Outlaws, and Concord.
Crap shoots are fine for players flocking to whatever eventually hits but they aren’t conducive to humane or sustainable development. Steam is a disaster, and yet it’s still light years ahead of console and smartphone storefronts when it comes to helping people find cool new stuff. The App and Google Play Stores, on the other hand, are slop-ruled hellscapes, and the console stores, which feel like they’ve barely changed in a decade, aren’t much better.
I’m not surprised the average Xbox and PSN player defaults to throwing more money at Call of Duty or Roblox when trying to find something new to play is worse than picking out what to watch next on Netflix. And a $250 billion video game industry built entirely on monetizing branded crossovers, exploiting user-generated content, and perniciously designed time-wasting skinner boxes seems like a huge waste.
Here are 50 of the games that died in 2024, were delisted, or had their server shutdown dates announced. Concord is currently at the top of the live service speedrun leaderboard, lasting even fewer weeks than Steam asset flip grift The Day Before. Suicide Squad and Foamstars are still running but content abandoned less than a year after release. Like Suicide Squad, Islands of Insight’s developers introduced an offline version in the final update. And there were plenty of games that didn’t officially die in 2024 but are fading fast. Spectre, a neat-looking tactical shooter with a clever gameplay twist, is just one of many that doesn’t look long for this world unfortunately.
Live Service Interrupted
Marvel Rivals proved there’s still room for newcomers in the hero shooter space. It’s dominated on Steam and console throughout December. Enthusiasm might cool in a few months but people are Having Fun and it Looks Cool which is more than enough to set it up for longer term success, even if falls out of the top 10 by summer. The Fantastic Four stuff already looks very cool.
The First Descendant and Once Human both collapsed from their peaks last summer but might be sustainable at their new concurrent levels (10K and 25K respectively). Both still seem to occupy a positive if much smaller space within their niches (sex bot looter shooter and post-apocalyptic home renovator respectively). These games seem to have settled into a good level of reasonable success but I could see both sunsetting by early 2026 if their respective publishers were banking more on moonshots more in line with the player levels back at launch.
Helldivers 2 is so back after its excellent free Omens of Tyranny update. The new Halo: ODST-fueled alien urban warfare has injected some much needed new lore and meme-fodder into the ongoing galactic war effort. I think many players are still burnt out on the core loop though, and unless that gets dramatically remixed at some point the baseline attrition will continue. The thing that was most refreshing about Helldivers 2 at launch—no progression treadmill—is also what keeps me from popping back in once or twice a week. I’d love to see new difficulty levels, specialty dungeons, or bigger narrative events heading into the one-year anniversary.
Apex Legends really fell off this year. Previously firmly in the top-10 on consoles it now barely cracks the top 20 now. It’s rapidly approaching its lowest Steam concurrents since its surprise launch in 2021. There’s a general malaise around character balancing, monetization, and matchmaking, and players are desperate for substantive new content that meaningfully shakes the game up. CEO Andrew Wilson promised a major expansion of the battle royale formula in 2024 and it never came.
Destiny 2’s vibes are even worse lately. It got a major boost from its Final Shape expansion in June and then immediately receded as players completed the 10-year story arc and all but the hardcore fans stopped playing again. There’s been a series of high-profile bugs recently and the hit to Bungie’s resources from major layoffs has clearly impacted the game especially around things like player support and quality assurance.
While still cracking the top-15 weekly active users on Steam, December was Destiny 2’s lowest month ever for concurrents on the platform. 2025 is the year we find out if the game can survive. What form that takes remains to be seen. My guess is the game’s future is as a much less ambitious but still satisfying roguelite shooter that emulates Dead Cells and Hades.
The Year In Apologies
Helldivers II creative lead Jhan Pilestedt apologized for developers "horrible" comments making fun of players complaining about a balance patch and also for the game's controversial PSN login requirement on Steam when review bombing turned its user rating negative.
Dragon's Dogma II's developers sincerely apologized for "any inconvenience" associated with the Steam backlash over the single-player RPG's gameplay altering microtransactions.
Cities: Skylines II publisher Paradox Interactive was "truly sorry" for trying to sell beachfront DLC before it had finished fixing major complaints with the underlying game.
Sony apologized to Last of Us director Neil Druckmamn for publishing an interview with him that included several made-up quotes which were subsequently made fun of on social media.
Bungie apologized for launch issues with the Final Shape expansion that prevented fans from playing or made them miss out on important cutscenes.
Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida apologized for several issues in the game's Dawntrail expansion at launch, including "memory fragmentation" on Xbox.
Bend Studio community manager Kevin McAllister apologized to Days Gone fans for previous studio leadership continually feeding "false hope" of a sequel that never got greenlit.
Ubisoft apologized for Assassin’s Creed Shadows footage using a historical reenactment group's flag without permission, promotional materials that "caused concern within the Japanese community," and for a pair of character statues that included an "insensitive design" of a broken torii gate.
Jaime Lee Curtis, who starred in the terrible Borderlands movie, apologized for calling recent Marvel movies bad. "My comments about Marvel were stupid and I will do better," she tweeted.
Lionsgate offered its "sincere apologies" for a Megalopolis trailer that used movie review quotes made up by AI.
Persona 3 Reload producer Kazuhisa was sorry fans on three seperate occasions that they would never get the portable version's female protagonist Kotone added to the remake because it would have cost too much and taken too long.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai apologized to fans who spent thousands of hours playing his games instead of doing more worthwhile things with their time.
Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann apologized for the "awful launch experience" of the latest version of the game. "The infrastructure simply could not handle the amount of requests and started to fail," he said on a livestream.
Square Enix apologized for "confusion" around a new FFXIV hairstyle called "Doing The Wave" that used a fan art contest winner as a reference but ended up making it look much worse due to "polygon count."
Nearly 15,000 people were laid off from dozens of development teams in 2024. At least 49 game studios shutdown, including several that had been around for decades, as well as ones that had only popped up in the last few years and never even got to ship their first game. OlliOlli maker Roll7 was one of the groups shuttered after Take-Two, on the eve of making up to $1 billion off of GTA 6 pre-orders alone, decided to ditch its small game publishing label Private Division.
My Top 10 Games Of 2024
1000xRESIST: haunting, intimate, frustrating
Animal Well: felt like playing Fez and Metroid for the first time again but more fun
Arco: FTL: Faster Than Light meets a Paul Thomas Anderson revenge Western
Astro Bot: convinced me that finding fun in simplicity isn’t cheap and shallow but actually incredibly hard and rewarding
Balatro: this game is almost perfect and that music rules
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth: they really messed this one up but it still enraptured me
Helldivers 2: the bros and I will never forget
Kunitsu Gami: Path of the Goddess: knows what it does well and focuses almost exclusively on that except for the idiotic base building
Pepper Grinder: my kids made me play it and then they went to sleep and I died for hours trying to beat that damn skeleton
Thronefall: city management and tower defense strategy stripped down to their basics and meticulously refined until both elegantly simple and beautifully minimalist
Honorable mentions: Star Wars Outlaws, Pacific Drive, Thank Goodness You're Here, Stellar Blade, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marines 2, UFO 50, Solium Infernum
Things that might have made my list if they’d come out sooner: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
Other games I haven't finished yet because they're way too long: Metaphor: Refantazio, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Unicorn Overlord, Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Stuff I'll get to eventually: Mouthwashing, Threshold, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure, Frostpunk 2, The Rise of the Golden Idol
Tiny correction: Apex Legends "surprise launch in 2021" should be 2019. Always a pleasure to hear you on the end of year Bullet Points podcast btw!