Games of the Year 2023: The biggest and best, discussed on our podcast

It’s a new year, but we’re still thinking about the amazing games we played last year. This week, we’re highlighting some of your favorite captures from 2023 in Share of the Year: 

Welcome to 2024, everyone! With our Game of the Year coverage just about wrapped up, we've put together this handy article in which we're going to recap all of 2023's winners. Indeed, it's time to put that last 12 months behind us and look ahead to what should be another exciting year for PlayStation fans.

As we get into the final hours of the year, it’s time to reveal our overall Game of the Year 2023 winner!

Oh, hey! Been a minute, hasn't it? Well, a year. It's been a year. Tell you what, though, it sure does feel shorter than that. 2023 has been a whirlwind, full of huge games and even bigger news from January right through to, well, just the other day.

For far too long, Xbox gamers have had to say to themselves “Next year. Next year’s going to be the big one” as they hope for platform defining exclusives. It’s no secret that Microsoft’s expanding collection of game studios have struggled to produce over the last few years, but 2023 was a year that changed that in some ways.

2023 was a huge year for PlayStation 5, with Sony finally able to cut loose and produce consoles without any of the constraints of the last few years. There’s now over 50 million PS5 consoles out in the wild, as they’ve taken a firm grasp of this generation, and then there’s the launch of the PlayStation VR 2 to hopefully rekindle their ambitions for virtual reality.

2023 has been another great year for games as a whole with some exceptional experiences that have been a pure joy to play, but as always there’s been some jarring disappointments that hit hard, and we’ve seen the impact of slowing economies around the world on executives making business decisions.

Ho ho hello! Christmas may already seem a distant memory, but we have gathered in our finest festive gear for one final treat — the Eurogamer Newscast News Quiz of the Year 2023.

Valve have put together their "Best Of 2023" lists on Steam. This is different from the Steam Awards, voting for which is ongoing, and instead is built from Steam data like revenue, peak concurrent players, and so on. It's interesting every year as older games or indie obscurities do better than you expect.

The PC Master Race has been a meme for a good 15 years now, but it’s truer than ever in 2023. A top tier gaming PC might be horrendously expensive when stacked up against a PS5 or Xbox Series X|S, but these days it gives you the best of all worlds. Almost.

I think almost every gamer would agree that how a game feels to play is absolutely the most important factor in whether it’s fun or not. Given how many fan-created ‘demakes’ there are of contemporary blockbusters, the proliferation of pixel art (which while it can be pretty is hardly pushing graphical limits), and hilariously shonky nonsense of a game like Vampire Survivors, it’s pretty clear that gameplay is king.

Music is an increasingly important part of modern video games, able to elevate an experience to new heights, adding real emotion to scenes and engaging the player on a more subconscious level. What’s particularly delightful is when it goes beyond merely being an added element alongside the action that takes place on screen, but rather an integral part of the game, right down to its very conception. Of course, just being good music that you can happily listen to outside of a game-playing context helps as well…