#351: The song remains the same

Happy new year! And welcome, one and all, to the modestly new-look Hit Points. Weekly Friday emails are no longer paywalled, and are henceforth free to all. Paid folks will now get at least two additional  newsletters a month, a monthly weekend edition all about the games I’ve been playing, and the biggest dividend of all: access to the sub-exclusive Hit Points Discord, aka the last good place on the internet.

A pretty good deal, I reckon — especially with the current special offer, which gets you 50% off your first three months when you subscribe. That’s a minimum of, what, seven newsletters? For two quid? Surely irresistible. (Right?)

Anyway, sorry, going on a bit. Let’s get down to business.

This is supposed to be a quiet time of year. Unless you’re at CES, that bafflingly scheduled shindig that sees the tech industry descend on Las Vegas to show off its stupidest new ideas, there’s not a lot going on. There’s certainly not been much happening at Hit Points Towers this week; as I slowly coax my brain out of eat-cheese-in-front-of-the-fire mode, I have spent the week on dull-but-necessary admin tasks. It’s been boring and quiet and frankly, that’s how it should be in January. You keep your head down and your mouth shut and watch the clock, trying not to think about cheese.

Apparently that message hasn’t quite sunk in out there, at least not as widely as you’d hope. There’s been a fair bit of seasonally inappropriate hand-wringing and garment-rending over the last few days at Circana’s list of 2025’s five most-played PlayStation games. The list, you see, is identical to 2024’s. Do you even need me to type them out? Ugh, fine. Fortnite, Call Of Duty, GTAV, Roblox, Minecraft. Happy now? No, didn’t think so. Hardly sets the pulse racing, does it.

I can certainly see where all the angst is coming from. The more cultured enthusiasts among us might rightly fret about how much oxygen these ageing games soak up, and how much good stuff their armies of players are missing out on. Members of the press surely have their head in their hands at the prospect of spending yet another year covering the same old stuff. And of course those in the business of making and selling games must see this apparent cultural and commercial stasis as the darkest omen, the final confirmation of their worst fears. What hope have you got of finding an audience for your hard work when things are so firmly, miserably entrenched?

I sympathise, particularly with the latter camp, for whom good games are not just about personal enjoyment, the betterment of the medium or the health of the wider industry, but something more existential. It is easy, and therefore tempting, to see this as the core symptom of the game industry’s broader sickness; to ascribe all the layoffs, the closures, the funding deserts and discovery woes to the fact that most people are happy playing the same small handful of megagames to the exclusion of anything else, and will continue to be so forever. Every few months some data emerges to back this theory up, whether it’s a list like Circana’s, a Spotify Wrapped-style thing, or some Steam data revealing just how many of its army of users own nothing but Counter-Strike. And thus we arrive at our miserable consensus: there is a timebomb out there comprised of a whole generation of kids who, weaned on parasocial relationships with Minecraft YouTubers or hanging out with friends in some Roblox slopspace, will never want to play anything else, and certainly won’t want to pay for it.

The reality, I suspect, is rather more nuanced than that. Don’t get me wrong: clearly everything is fucked right now. But I do not think this trend is remotely why everything is fucked. It seems obvious, and natural, to me that these five games have continued and will continue to dominate playtime not just on PlayStation, but on just about every other platform as well. This is just maths, right? An hour a week on Fortnite with your work buddies or school chums etc is obviously going to make more of an impact on the data than the two hours you spent playing And Roger, or even the 50 hours you put into Ghost Of Yotei. I am an outlier, given my professional obligations — any consultant worth their salt plays a lot of games in order to understand the evolving shape of things. And lo, according to Steam I played 108 games last year. But I spent 43% of my time on the platform playing Balatro. What are we to take from this? Firstly, Balatro is a disease and I really had a problem for a while there. Secondly: the headline figures can only tell us so much.

This is the great curse of aggregated data. Spotify Wrapped was always useless to me because I made a new playlist every year, chucking in stuff I liked as I went along, and when Wrapped came around it would try and tell me that my favourite tune of the year was the first one I put in the playlist in January. The same applies here. If you played Fortnite all year, of course it’s going to beat your two-month Arc Raiders obsession when the end-of-year numbers get crunched.

I do not doubt that there are a lot of people out there who play these games and nothing else — who see a new console as the new box for Fortnite or whatever, and think about it no more deeply than that. But those people have always existed. Twenty years ago they were the people with a 360 under the telly and a game shelf containing only a two-year old Call Of Duty, the latest FIFA, and some licensed dreck they got in a hardware bundle and will never play. We’ve had Wii-owning nans with a Balance Board under the stairs, and Candy Crush aunties and so on. You could have looked at all of these groups and fretted about whether they’d ever become proper, capital-G gamers. They’d have recoiled in horror at the mere suggestion of it. So it is today, surely, with a lot of the people that use one of the big live-service platform titans as a hangout space. It’s hardly as if, if you took their Roblox away, they’d start spending two grand a year on games, just as taking Taylor Swift off streaming services wouldn’t suddenly spark a surge in the popularity of progressive house music. (That’d be cool though.)

Bluntly — and apologies to longtime readers for trotting out one of Hit Points’ favourite phrases — these people are not your audience. Don’t worry about them, or the calcified live-service hegemony. You have enough to worry about already! There is, at least, some good news out there, that I think puts Circana’s data in useful context. The great Simon Carless brings word that new Steam games had a great 2025: 31 of the 50 top-grossing games were less than two years old, up from 24 the year before. People are still buying new games! There is hope! Let’s try and have a little of that in 2026, perhaps, as a treat. It sure looks like we are going to need it.

MORE!

• Ah. What was I just saying about hope? Nvidia and ARM are reportedly planning some enormous price hikes to GPUs in the next few months, with Nvidia’s top-end RTX 5090 apparently set to rise from its current $2000-ish to $5k. Thanks, AI hyperscalers, you absolute bellends. Nvidia is now rumoured to be bringing back the RTX 3060 so consumers actually have something to buy. Probably time you bought whatever it is you’ve had your eye on, imo. A hard drive, a new phone, whatever. Things are about to get stupid.
• Xbox just had its worst ever year in the UK, according to The Game Business sales-whisperer Chris Dring. While Sony also saw hardware sales decline on Brexit Island, Xbox consoles came off even worse, slumping 39% compared to PS5’s 19%.
• Tributes have been paid this week to David Rosen, a founding father of the Japanese arcade scene and a co-founder and former president of Sega, who passed away on Christmas Day.
• Tributes have also been paid to Albert Penello, former Xbox marketing bod, who has died of cancer at just 53. I met him one E3, if memory serves in the run-up to the launch of Xbox One X, and he was a nice, enthusiastic sort. Very sad.
• Even sadder is the passing of UK game journalist Patrick Dane, most recently news editor at the Hit Points-affiliated This Week In Videogames, in a car accident over Christmas. I never met Patrick — he was from the generation after mine, I think — but his name came up in conversation often and he was always spoken of highly. Really horrible stuff. Hit Points sends its sincere condolences to Patrick’s friends, colleagues and family.
• Meanwhile, Hit Points sends a big metaphorical brown bag full of dogshit to Ubisoft, which has shuttered its studio in Halifax (Canada, not Yorkshire) less than a month after staff there voted to unionise. The union in question, CWA Canada, is spitting feathers and demanding answers; former Halifax staffer Jon Huffman has urged Ubisoft to prove the studio’s unionisation and closure are unconnected. “The workers, their families, the people of Nova Scotia, and all of us who love videogames made in Canada deserve nothing less,” he understandably harrumphed.
• Kinetic Games, maker of co-op horror smash Phasmophobia, is moving into publishing. While this is good and welcome and all that, the studio says it wants to hear from teams “who have a clear vision for their title and are 12-18 months from release” and, well, hmm. Most teams these days would probably appreciate earlier access to funding than this sort of model offers, no? They need help getting started more than a push over the finishing line. Not sure, tired, still thinking about cheese. The more the merrier I suppose.
• Cloudhead Games, maker of Pistol Whip — one of the few true VR killer apps, for my money — has laid off 70% of its workforce. “The general downturn of the gaming industry and VR’s still-nascent challenges, including a lack of platform funding, have placed us in an impossible position,” said CEO Denny Unger. 
• Discord has confidentially filed for an IPO, according to the bean-counting fans at Bloomberg. Ominous news for members of the subscriber-exclusive Hit Points Discord, but we’re going nowhere just yet. I’m sure suitable alternatives will start popping up when the overlords inevitably flick the enshittification switch.
• Sony has patented an AI-generated “ghost player” which will take over from you when you get stuck. Sheesh. One solution to the ol’ backlog I suppose.
• Lastly, if you’re disappointed at my lack of commentary on CES, I believe this Rock Paper Shotgun headline rather sums up my feelings on the matter: "The fastest gaming CPU now has a very, very, very, very, very, very, very slightly faster replacement." Thanking you.

That’ll do! I had a lovely, restful break but it feels so nice to be back in the chair bashing out nonsense again. A final nudge about that 50% subscription offer — and a brief mention of the fancy new Tip Jar below, if you're not into the whole subscribing thing — before I wish you a blissful weekend and take my leave. See you next week!