Black Friday is upon us, dear readers, and by all accounts, this year's sale is meant to be a pretty good one for PC gaming hardware, so let us help you navigate the trauma of endlessly navigating several different price-checking sites to bring you the best Black Friday deals from across the internet. Together with our hardware editor James, I'll be manning our Black Friday liveblog this week, bringing you rolling coverage of the stuff we think is worth highlighting as it happens, from great deals on new microSD cards for your Steam Deck to the best discounts on graphics cards, SSDs and more. James will also be regularly updating our dedicated Black Friday hub pages (linked below) with all the best deals if you're looking for something more specific.
2023 Has Been The Best Year For Games In Two Decades
31.10.2023 - 23:53 / thegamer.com / Pete Parsons / Best
Gamers have been eating well throughout 2023, as it seems like the industry is pumping out an almost never-ending supply of quality titles. We've been handed some of the best reviewed games ever in recent months, thanks to Baldur's Gate 3 becoming a surprise smash hit, Nintendo knocking it out of the park with both Mario and Zelda, and Insomniac delivering arguably the best superhero game ever made.
Most of us have a general feeling that 2023 is up there as one of the best years in gaming ever, and we now have the facts to back that up. According to stats put together by Axios Gaming, this year has seen more games launch to a Metacritic score of over 90 than any year in the past two decades, as 25 titles have received Metacritic's top billing since the start of the year.
If even Xbox is killing it with great exclusives like Hi-Fi Rush and Starfield, you know it's been a pretty good year.
Comparatively, the average count of games getting higher than 90 each year over the past decade has been roughly half of that. The last year to see so many 90+ rated titles released in a single year was 2011, which saw the launches of huge titles like Portal 2, Dark Souls, Batman: Arkham City, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Infamous 2, Uncharted 3, and so on.
2023's staggering total of 25 games with a score of 90+ doesn't paint the whole picture though. There are several absolutely incredible titles that have just missed out on the 90+ threshold this year, including Hi-Fi Rush, Armored Core 6, Alan Wake 2, the Dead Space remake, and indie gem Pizza Tower. It's been a fantastic year, and threatens to get even better with titles like Persona 5 Tactica and Like a Dragon: Gaiden yet to release.
However, despite it being such a brilliant year for games themselves, the same can't be said about the industry as a whole. We've seen countless people impacted by mass layoffs throughout 2023, the most recent example being PlayStation-owned studio Bungie. Despite insisting that layoffs weren't going to happen, the studio has now laid off over 100 workers, as the announcement was quickly followed up by a "tone-deaf" response from CEO Pete Parsons.
For every game that gets over a score of over 90+ on Metacritic, there's a different publisher that announces either mass layoffs or a studio closure, and it just keeps happening. It's a sign of an incredibly unhealthy industry, as more and more publishers completely disregard the lives of the people that makes the incredible games we get to play. This may be one of the best years for games that we've ever seen, but it's also undoubtedly one of the worst.
Next: No Video Game Is Scarier Than The State Of The Games Industry
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