2024 gave us some great games. This list's top 10 is as good as any I've seen in my 14 (?!) years running this section at Paste. But the industry is at a major crossroads right now, stuck between a dying era of ever-escalating size and scope and whatever comes next, and that's reflected by what kind of games made a splash this year. The fact that no huge budget "AAA" game by a Western studio with hundreds of (always crunched, always on the verge of being laid off) employees resonated with audiences or critics in 2024 shows how creatively bankrupt the dominant sector of the games world is today. Releasing good art through a corporation is always exceedingly difficult but for games it's as impossible as it's ever been (outside of Japanese companies, who are given more freedom to balance art and commerce than their Western counterparts); rampant layoffs, studio closures, and consolidation have wiped out a notable chunk of the industry's creative class, and what remains is too risk-averse and commercially desperate to make anything genuinely interesting or challenging. The only "major label" games worth celebrating this year that weren't developed in Japan were smaller titles sent out to die by massive publishers who have no idea what they're doing, an explicit critique of the corporatism that brought the industry to this place, and an old-fashioned-ish Bioware RPG that barely made our list.
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