Years later, rhythm game Geometry Dash smashes its player peak

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty has performed just as well as The Witcher 3's DLC offerings despite being released years after the base game.

Hit management game Factorio has finally added a feature that its developers held off on for years because they considered it "too hardcore."

Character-based historical 4X Old World will release a fourth DLC on January 11th, Wonders and Dynasties, bringing a whole, whole lot of new historical characters to the dynastic politics of your ancient empires. Something like 120 new characters, in fact, ranging from Hannibal and Caesar to Khufu and Stateira. That alongside 21 new character traits for those historicals and 100-some new events related to the politics of your imperial dynasty.

Capcom announced Monster Hunter Wilds during last month's The Game Awards with a release date of 2025. We're still over a year out, but plenty of fans are eager to slay the biggest critters they can find, flocking back to World and boosting its player count to record highs.

Making money online should be a relatively simple process. You provide your goods and services, those interested purchase them, and there’s usually some division of the profits between you and the distributor.

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.

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.

What does it mean to be an indie developer? Well, the definition these days seems to about as broad the Action-Adventure genre. Games with all the hallmarks of an indie production can come from a small team within a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, from indie publishers that have brought developers in-house, and then we’ve seen independent developers build up and grow over the course of decades to the point that they can craft landmark, genre redefining RPGs.

It's been a rough year for the games industry. An estimated 9,000 people have been laid off in the industry this year, affecting employees at companies like Embracer Group, Epic Games, Amazon Games, Ubisoft, Activision, Bungie, Frontier, Codemasters, BioWare, Paradox, and many more. We've also seen the shuttering of numerous studios, including Volition, Free Radical, and Shadow Gambit creators Mimimi Games. Layoffs have also affected companies adjacent to video games, like Hasbro, which laid of 1,100 people two weeks before Christmas.

I may not put much thought into Christmas lists today, but back when I was a kid they were practically an art form. From the presentation to the content itself, I pulled out all the stops to draw attention to whatever it was I coveted at the time.

Every year since 2009, either a Call of Duty game or a Rockstar title was No. 1, but that could change in 2023.