2025 will be a make-or-break year for triple-A video games as we know them

Cast your eyes across the 2025 video game release schedule and you might notice a bit of a trend. There are triple-A games here. In fact, there are a of triple-A video games here. After a desperately barren year for them in 2024 – plenty of good games and surprisingly successful games; very few big, expensive ventures you’d hang your hat on – in 2025, the triple-A blockbuster is well and truly back.

It’s worth a quick runthrough here, just to take in the scale of it. The first real rush starts in a bizarrely busy February, where Avowed, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Monster Hunter Wilds make up the four horsemen of the open world action adventure apocalypse, backed up by Civilization 7 and Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. It’s hard to exaggerate: this is a completely ridiculous release slate for February – I’m struggling to remember another month like it, let alone one outside the usual Q4 crush.

After that, things get a bit woolier in terms of dates – there’s almost nothing with a solid one beyond March – but just have a look at what else is coming from the big-budget end of the industry this year. Microsoft’s output has clunked into gear at last, with Fable, Doom: The Dark Ages, The Outer Worlds 2 and inevitably a new Call of Duty due in 2025. Sony has Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yotei dated for this year (and, though it probably won’t be Sony’s by the time it launches, there’s also Elden Ring Nightreign coming soon). Nintendo has Metroid Prime 4, Pokémon Legends Z-A, and whatever else might appear as launch window games for the Switch 2 (my bet’s on Mario Kart).

Then there are the multiplatform releases: there’s the flashy Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra from Amy Hennig’s new team, and the very BioShock-like Judas, from Ken Levine’s new studio. There’s the long-awaited Skate 4, and the equally long-awaited Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. There’ll probably be something from EA, beyond its usual wave of sports games like EA FC, and no doubt more big bets from Tencent and NetEase, like the upcoming Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, or South Korea’s burgeoning industry such as Crimson Desert. And it’s a particularly massive year for 2K, which on top of Civ 7 also has Borderlands 4, Mafia: The Old Country and of course, the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, Grand Theft Auto 6.

All these are just the real headlines, and just the ones we know about right now. But while in any other year we’d be saying “triple-A games are back” and leaving it at that – the sign of an industry continuing the cycle of busier years and quieter years, for instance, or the green shoots showing after a bit of a post-covid blip maybe – in this case that wouldn’t feel quite right.