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There were a lot of great fucking indie games released this year, from the comments a bunch of people here have missed some great indie games.
Hades II, Silksong, Blue Prince, Ball x Pit, Mandragora, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, Citizen Sleeper 2, Dispatch, Absolum, Megabonk, Constance, Wheel World, Cloverpit, that's only a fraction of this year's releases and I'm not even counting the more ambitious titles like The Alters and Expedition 33. Indie fans have been eating good for sure.
From the list I only own Silksong, Megabonk, and Expedition 33, I know about, but do not own and have not played Hades II, but I would still have a bunch of 2025 indie games I really liked. (The Wandering Village is an example from the country I live in even).
Don't forget the one that SHOULD HAVE gotten GOTY: Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
According to Metacritic, there were only eight 9/10 or better games this year. Or two, if you ignore remakes, remasters, and sequels. Maybe the issue is a drop in quality this year...?
https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/all/all/current-year/
I do buy new games even full price on rare occasion. Regardless of that, there's nothing new games do much better than old games besides graphics and that mattering declined hard once league of legends, counter strike, fortnite, minecraft, roblox, etc became people's childhood to their ongoing adulthood games. I've met people that haven't spent a dime on genshin impact while having played for 5 years
No one is missing out on the best 2025 games if they're playing the best games of 2015. Time is finite and if it's filled with good, what difference does it make if it's new or old. You're not missing out if you're playing the best games of 2000-2014 in 2025.
I follow emulation on Android communities and people love playing the greatest hits of the PS2, Gamecube, DS, 3DS, PSP, Vita and it seems to mostly be teenagers. And now we're getting good PC emulation support and PS3 and X360 support is progressing. Switch on Android emulation is pretty good now. Android, Steam Machine, Steam Deck, Steam Frame, Legion Go, Rog Ally, GPD Win, Ayaneo. Even Switch 2. The relatively low power gaming scene is growing and that bodes well for "classic/retro/oldies" gaming.
It's been 12 years since the PS4 launched. Early PS4 games don't play much different than 2025 games. The classics oldie radio station of games are soon going to be very modern. 2007 Bioshock era games are already very modern and look pretty good too
Fourteen percent seems huge though, considering video games have technically been a thing since, what, the 70s or 50s.
The gaming industry for new games being released is brutal. The competition is sky high, and all you need to think about are games like Stardew Valley or Skyrim. There are so many options to choose from, a new young gamer has barely any reason to pay full price for any new games. We are entering the "Please play out game! It's free!" phase, and still no one will spend the time. Time and attention are the most valuable thing.
"PAY attention" "How do you like to SPEND your time"
Those phrases don't prove much but if more people viewed their time and attention as commodities.. idk.. they might chose to "invest" them in other things.
I kinda gave up buying new stuff because of all the editions bullshit. Complete, Deluxe, Gold, Ultimate, Season Pass, Whatever The Fuck Else Special Director's Cut - yeah, yo ho ho ho your capitalist ass straight to the fire sell.
Same here, game on sale for $3, but then I see it had $200 in DLC to play the complete game. Major turn off.
Icarus, Conan, hit man 3, etc.
hitman 3 is fucking ridiculous. it's a great game, I love it, but for the love of God just release it in one piece and kill the online mode
Literally just had that same thing with Icarus while I was looking at the winter sale. I went to reviews to find the catch for the game and people were saying the base game is pretty just a big demo.
Yeah, it dawned on me a few years ago that games are being sold in an unfinished state just so they can sell us the rest later.
If you're still naive enough to spend money on things you can be getting for free (just to make someone else richer), at least wait until what you're buying is complete.
yeah, i don't mind DLC being sold separately, especially when it's a full-fledged expansion like a good old add-on - not just an extra mission and stuff - proper 5-10 extra hours. But when you get this impossible to follow selection of options - it annoys the hell out of me and i switch to something that has only one package and doesn't require market analysis skills to figure out the best version to buy. Or just yo ho ho fuck'em all instead because that's what happens.
I have a gtx 1080. 2025 games are mostly written in unreal 5. Unreal 5 is designed such that not even the highest end gpus can actually run it without framegen. And now also with mandatory raytracing.
Older games still work, and they look and run better for me.
And most U5 games look kinda the same
It does depend on the game, Satisfactory for example uses UE5 (5.3.2) and runs perfectly fine for me without framegen at 5120x1440. Admittedly I run it on an RX 6900, so not an average card. But at the other hand it's already an older one and that resolution approaches 4K.
Unless something changed fairly recently the game also doesn't use Lumen by default, let alone raytracing. Was RT made mandatory in later UE5 versions? Because it's definitely not mandatory for every UE5 version.
UE5 is by no means a lightweight engine, but I do wonder how many of the issues are caused by lack of optimisation.
I would love to play satisfactory more but it makes my cpu so hot :( and now that RAM prices have tripled or whatever I'm not gonna be upgrading any time soon
Yeah, RAM prices are crazy. When I built my current system I threw in 64GB so I could mess around with stuff like Kubernetes and virtual machines without worrying about memory shortage. Memory was cheap enough that it was a no-brainer. I feel like a millionaire when I look at how much that would set me back now. 😅
ue5 doesn't force rt. But the number of games that do mandate rt (ex the latest indiana jones game) is increasing. I flat out can't play those.
Ah, yeah, that's a design decision that sucks. Those games I'll pick up in few years when I have a card that's capable of RT at an acceptable framerate. I get that tech becomes mandatory at some point, the same has happened with OpenGL/DirectX and the various pixel shading versions back in the day. But in my opinion enforcing ray tracing came way too early, seeing how it eats performance.
It doesn't help also that new GPUs and now even disk drives and RAMs are ridiculously expensive.
I am sure the end goal of corpos is to turn this into another subscription service.
My method of patient gaming is to only buy games that are $10 or less
Just got subnautica, hades 1, disco Elysium, oxygen not included, hollow knight (I’m sad to learn I don’t like platformers that much…), kerbal space program.
Shit, I have so much to play for the next 5 years just there.
Factorio and Hades 2 were my exceptions, got them full price.
THAT. That's the spirit!
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at least the legal playtime that is
nope, sir, this is piracy-free space. piracy don't exist. it's bogus.
Haven't played a single game from 2025. I don't even think I saw any that caught my eye tbh.
Oh no i lie - World of goo 2 is definitely on my wishlist. Maybe next year though, I'm still busy with Satisfactory at the moment
Oh wow Satisfactory is from last year??!
Time flies when you're building manifolds, I guess.
I know this is patient gamers, but this was one of the best years in gaming for a while.
My personal top 3:
Silksong - I played like 2h of Hollow Knight many years ago, then took a small break, but was so lost when I returned that I never touched it again, until Silksong got a release date and the hype made me check it out again. Amazing game and Silksong is even better. I 100% Silksong and I'm super excited for the free DLC next year. I kind of rushed Hollow Knight though, so I might return for some late-game stuff.
DK Bananza - honestly didn't expect to to enjoy it as much as I did, really fun and creative 3D platformer with some of the best and smoothest movements in any of them.
Expedition 33 - Honestly this was mostly off my radar for most of the year. I had heard about it now and then, but the turn based combat didn't sound appealing to me. When it was nominated for more VGA awards then any game before it, I checked it out as well. Also an absolute banger. Great Art, Story and the turn based combat is a lot more fun than I thought it would be, really in depth to get the most out of each character. While J personally enjoyed Silksong the most this year, I can definitely understand the hype around it
I'm also looking forward to playing metroid prime 4, probably some.time next year
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Which probably only proves that Steam Machines is going to be more than enough for everyone.
There were games released this year? Neat. I'll probably check them out. Right after another round of Tetris.
Makes sense, most games were released before 2025
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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Patient Gamers
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