December 2023

Usada Pekora has made a big win after her bet in a horse race succeeded. The Japanese Hololive VTuber placed a ¥500,000 (~$3,500) bet on the racing horse Titleholder at the Arima Kinen race on December 24, 2023. The bet succeeded, and she received a payout of ¥1,650,000 (~$11,600). The success came with even more sentimental value, as it was also the final race the horse took part in.

Usada Pekora has been known as a fan of Titleholder. Oricon noted that the person behind the VTuber had placed the same bets for the horse at the previous Arima Kinen race on December 25, 2022, and the Spring Tenno Sho race on April 30, 2023. However, she lost both bets as Titleholder did not finish in the top three in either race.

Drew Scanlon is a former video producer here at Giant Bomb. He now works for Digital Eclipse helping make all those interactive documentaries we love. You can also find him rambling about race cars and raising money for Multiple Sclerosis.

Hey has anyone noticed that this was a really good year for video games? Who knew! Here’s my top ten from a wild year, and only half of them are first-party Nintendo titles!

10. WarioWare: Move It!

You give me a WarioWare game and I’m going to at LEAST like it. Even with one of the more disappointing entries – like the previous Switch title Get it Together – there’s such a fun mystery of what dumbass thing the game is going to make you do next.

We begin a week of Siliconera’s Game of the Year selections with the PlayStation 5! The system hit a level of maturity in 2023, with fewer cross-generation launches and more titles using the hardware’s full capabilities. It even got a VR headset this year! (Though without any software support worthy of contending in this particular category.) Read on for our PlayStation Game of the Year 2023 honorees!

These awards represent the consensus of the Siliconera staff. For more of the year’s award selections, check out our Game of the Year 2023 archive.

Resident Evil 4 Remake

While it stays closer to the action-focused approach of other Resident Evil remakes than the more suspenseful one of the original release, Resident Evil 4 Remake does a solid job of recreating the characters and world of the beloved series entry. There are lots of ways to play RE4 these days, and many of them are still worth playing! So in offering a fundamentally different take, Remake justifies its existence without stepping on any toes.

Like a Dragon: Ishin!

Bandai Namco revealed new crossover content from Xenosaga for the Japanese mobile game Tales of the Rays. The event's main highlight will be the in-person appearance of KOS-MOS, the combat android who is also the series' main star. Mariko Suzuki, the original Japanese voice actress for KOS-MOS, will also return to reprise her role in Tales of the Rays.

The crossover will also provide new Xenosaga-themed costumes for several existing Tales Of series characters. Tales of Berseria's protagonist Velvet will get a T-elos costume, while the deuteragonist Laphicet will receive a chaos outfit. Kanonno Earhart, who originally appeared in the 2009 PSP entry Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 2, will also have a costume modeled after MOMO Mizrahi.

Bandai Namco has also uploaded a trailer showcasing the Xenosaga crossover content on the Tales Of YouTube channel:

Ben Starr is an actor that you most likely know from playing Clive Rosfield in Final Fantasy XVI. But, did you know he also appears in Quantum Break and Company of Heroes 2? And, yes, Final Fantasy VIII is his favorite Final Fantasy. Yes, 8. If you've got a problem with that, you better Shuffle or Boogie.

Hello, this is Evil Uno.

What city am I in again? Who knows? I’m writing this from an airport lounge. This is appropriate because this is where I’ve done most of my gaming in 2023, not specifically this airport lounge, but you get it. Shout out to you, portable gaming devices! You’re the real heroes.

This was an exceptional year for video games. I feel like I’ve done an abnormally large amount of gaming this year, yet I still didn’t have enough time for some of the larger titles I know would have ultimately made this list. Such is life. I play by my own rules, so you can expect my list will follow in the same vein. Before I get started on my top 10 of the year, here are a few honorable mentions that I don’t care to elaborate on: Case of The Golden Idle DLC, Slay the Princess, Humanity, Dredge, and Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE.

Rough year over here in Argentina land but games and anime really came through and kept me distracted enough for me to not lose my sanity. So shout outs to all the workers that created all the games and shows I enjoy and love this year.

GAME #5: The Finals

I’ve been following Embark stuff ever since they dropped that cool ass fuck trailer for Arc Raiders (hope we hear more about that game soon). And I was kinda scared when they pushed back Arc Raiders in their development schedule to develop a first person shooter set on a cringy esport virtual reality called “The Finals”. Thankfully my fears were unfounded because this game rules! The running around feels smoooooth, the shooting is incredibly rewarding, the level destruction works perfectly and it's super dynamic, the game modes create that “anything can happen up to the last minute” feeling and the vibes of the game hit that perfect balance of hype and silliness without being annoying. All these things combine to create this beautiful moment to moment gameplay that even when you are out of the action your brain is in full Equalizer mode to see how to approach the next vault/cashout/encounter. So get a group of friends or enemies (this game is that fun) and get stealing!

It’s that wonderful time of year when I descend from my throne atop the world’s great video game website, VGC, to get paid millions of pounds by Jeff Grubb to grace the pages of Giant Bomb.

I won’t say much here other than I hope you have all been well in what has been a hellish year. For a much more eloquent take on the situation, I once again direct you to my friend Stacey Henley’s wonderful piece on the highs and lows of 2023 in games.

It is the pleasure of a lifetime to appear on and write for my favourite site. I was in high school when people were leaking phone numbers and China didn’t care, and now I’m regularly on this website that’s occasionally about video games. Thank you all for having me. Baldur’s Gate 3 sucks.

Xalavier Nelson Jr. is a BAFTA nominated writer and the creative director of Strange Scaffold, who you may know this year thanks to El Paso, Elsewhere.

I try to expose myself to as many games as I can, past and present, all in the hopes of not just understanding the games themselves, but their developers. Every video game I play is a chance to connect with the human beings--and creative ideas--that spawned them.

However, the disturbing trend I'm finding over the past few years is the idea of... game-shaped objects. Projects that offer me no avenue of connection outside of roughly resembling the feature list of something I've liked before. They're perfectly competent, horribly adequate experiences, and the recent idea of a 7/10 being well-built but boring has taken me by surprise. I'm used to 7/10 being the score for a game that stretches a little further than it should; games with playability issues that nonetheless tackle deeply interesting mechanical or narrative concepts.

You've probably already seen Eurogamer's top 50 games of 2023, but we didn't want to leave our end of year thoughts there. Big lists can sometimes feel impersonal, and as you know, tastes in games can be very personal. So we wanted to put together another kind of list, something that would show you - on a more personal level - the games that we, the people who write for Eurogamer, really enjoyed this year.

This brief series of articles will collect the top fives from a handful of different Eurogamer contributors, and we'll publish a handful of them each day for four days. We're not ordering the top fives because it's not really about that this time - ordering things. It's more important for us, here, to give you a sense of why.

Oh and please feel free - in fact, feel encouraged - to share your top fives below.

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Versus Evil announced its own closure on social media today.

"Today is a sad day," the company said. "After 10 wonderful years, Versus Evil is shutting its doors. We've loved bringing you the best indie games we could find & sharing so many happy memories with you all, our amazing community! From the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU for everything!"

In another post today, Versus Evil head of production Lance James confirmed that the indie publisher's entire team had been laid off.

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The Epic Games Store doesn't normally carry games rated Adults Only, it will make an exception for titles that only received the label due to the use of blockchain technology.

An update on Epic's developer site still notes that these games must comply with its blockchain and general guidelines. Games, for example, cannot facilitate gambling and link to NFT marketplaces.

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China today announced a series of planned restrictions on video game monetization and engagement tactics, according to Reuters.

The National Press and Publication Administrations released new draft rules that will ban a swath of common mechanisms in games, including daily log-in rewards, bonuses for first-time spenders, and incentives to spend repeatedly on a game.

Publishers will also be prohibited from offering loot boxes to minors or allowing for in-game items to be auctioned or used as speculative assets. Games will need to impose spending limits on players, while publishers will be required to run all their servers for Chinese games in China.

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Jill Braff has been appointed as head of studio for ZeniMax Online Studios and Bethesda Game Studios.

As reported by The Verge, her appointment was a part of the leadership changes shared with the news of Bobby Kotick's departure next week as CEO of Activision Blizzard.

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

There's a Cantonese saying I've been looking for an excuse to use in one of these columns for months, and with the year drawing to a close, I'm going to drop it here as a little present to myself.

"Sik see sik zoek dau."

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The 18-year-old responsible for last year's Grand Theft Auto 6 hack has been sentenced to an indefinite hospital order.

As BBC News reported, a judge said the GTA 6 hacker posed a "high risk" to the public. A mental health assessment found that they "continued to express the intent to return to cyber-crime as soon as possible."

Rockstar Games claimed that the hack cost the company $5 million in damages.

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Microsoft will be removing Windows Mixed Reality in a future operating system update.

The decision includes the Mixed Reality Portal app, Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR, and Steam VR Beta.

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First Contact Entertainment has announced its closure.

The Los Angeles-based studio shared a statement on social media, citing a "lack of support for VR within the industry" as the main reason for closing its doors.

"As an AAA VR game developer, we are just not able to justify the expense needed going forward," the studio said. "[We] are extremely proud of the team and grateful to our investors, our partners, and of course our community of dedicated and passionate players."

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Consumer spending on virtual reality content reached $844 million in 2023.

The figure represents a 10% decline year-on-year, according to a new report from analytic firm Omdia.

Omdia attributed the dip to global inflationary pressures and the underperformance of headsets such as Meta Quest 3, PSVR2, and Pico 4.

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PlayStation will no longer be removing over 1,300 Discovery TV shows from its platform next month.

Sony had previously announced that users will not be able to watch Discovery content on PlayStation from December 31, even if they had already purchased it.

However, the firm now says that due to an 'updated licensing agreement' with Warner Bros -- which owns the Discovery brand -- consumers will now be able to access their previously purchased shows 'for at least the next 30 months'.

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EA Sports FC 24 has continued its hold at the top spot, making it the best-selling game in the 2023 UK retail charts heading into Christmas.

According to the latest GfK data, the game experienced a 29% increase in sales after a slight dip last week. Hogwarts Legacy returned to No.2 due to a 17% boost in sales, pushing Super Mario Bros Wonder down to No.3.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 stayed at No.4, while Spider-Man 2 rose from No.7 to round out the Top 5.

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Newzoo has maintained its games market forecast for 2023 to remain at $184 billion in its annual review.

In October, the data firm lowered its games market value forecast predicting a stable growth of 0.6%, which it attributed to challenges in the mobile market.

Earlier this year, Newzoo estimated that the global games market would rise by 2.6% to reach $187 billion in 2023.

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When thinking about AMC's involvement in the industry, you'd be forgiven for immediately picturing how it has licensed its star franchise, The Walking Dead, to several game studios over the years.

But that's not its only foray into games. The company actually also runs an indie publisher, headed by (and composed entirely of) AMC Networks director of games Simon Ferrari.

"I started at AMC seven years ago as a freelancer, working mostly on The Walking Dead mobile games," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "But a little-known thing about AMC is that their approach to the new media landscape is to become an aggregate of boutiques instead of a big, monolithic service."

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Bobby Kotick will resign after more than 30 years as CEO of Activision Blizzard.

In a formal announcement to employees, the executive said he would be leaving on December 29.

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The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.

Looking back on the 10 Years Ago This Month columns covering 2013, there's a recurring theme of companies attempting significant power grabs and hilariously falling flat on their face in the process.

You saw it with the bungled launch of EA's SimCity, with an always-online requirement that was widely assumed (and later confirmed) to be a fig leaf excuse to slap some DRM on a game that didn't need it.

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PlayStation 5 has sold 50 million consoles worldwide, Sony has announced.

It achieved the feat on December 9th, 2023, which means the console is now tracking just one week behind the PlayStation 4. Back in July when the console hit the 40 million mark, it was tracking two months behind PS4.

The PS5's launch was hampered by severe stock issues driven by a worldwide shortage of components, which meant the console was consistently out of stock for its first two years on the market.

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As the holidays draw near, it's the time for us to indulge and feast upon pie… charts. And bar graphs, tables, and other statistics.

I refer to, of course, the annual GamesIndustry.biz Year In Numbers infographic, providing you with a snapshot of where the video games business stands as the year ends (perfect for sounding knowledgeable in any remaining meeting you unfortunately have coming up in the last couple of days before the break).

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Google has agreed to pay $700 million in an antitrust settlement with US state attorney generals.

As reported by The Verge, the case was settled in September and the details have now been made public, including changes being made to its Play store.

The antitrust case was first brought forward in July 2021, where it was argued that Google was unlawfully maintaining a monopoly on Android devices with its Play store.

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During November, Twitch amassed 1.72 billion hours watched in viewership.

The figure represents a 3% dip when compared to October's 1.77 billion, according to Stream Elements and Rainmaker. gg's State of the Stream report. The month of November is a day shorter than October.

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Once upon a time, games veteran Don Daglow gazed into his crystal ball and told GamesIndustry.biz what he expected from the next decade in the video games business.

Ten years later (okay, 11, but Daglow's very busy and so are we), we caught up with him to see how accurate his predictions were and what he believes the future holds for the games industry.

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Remember when the pandemic hit?

Everything sucked, nobody could do anything, and things got weird. Everyone dealt with it in their own way.

For example, we decided that instead of devoting all of our resources to covering the ins and outs of the games industry, it would serve our readers better to address their mental health. By way of showing them pictures of cute pets.

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Activision Blizzard is ending its hybrid work model for QA staffers next month.

The mandate will result in quality assurance employees in Minneapolis, Austin, and El Segundo returning to office work full-time.

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Original Story, Tuesday, December 19: A ransomware group has published 1.67 TB of content from Insomniac Games following a breach last week.

As Cyber Daily reports, the Rhysida ransomware group stole data from the PlayStation studio on December 12.

It put the data on auction for 50 bitcoins (roughly $2 million) with a week's deadline before releasing 1.67 TB of stolen internal data earlier today.

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The New Zealand games industry generated NZD $434.4 million ($270.9 million) in the financial year ended March 2023, according to a survey by the New Zealand Game Developers Association.

This represents a 7% growth year-over-year, compared to an increase of 47% in the previous financial year.

According to the NZGDA, this small growth was attributed to competition from Australian tax incentives and the end of lockdown, as well as skill shortages and a lack of hiring diversity.

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Trade body UKIE has maintained a lovely tradition for several years now: celebrating a UK Game of the Show at Gamescom.

The task of finding a winner has fallen onto GamesIndustry.biz for the past couple of years now, last year leading us to the wonderful Shadows of Doubt.

There were many worthy contenders this year again, but our decision went towards a title that channelled the perspective-shifting cleverness and striking visual identity of a Monument Valley or a Carto: Paper Trail, from Newfangled Games.

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Tencent has shuttered Team Kajiu, a North American subsidiary of the TiMi Studio Group.

The US studio was established back in 2020; it had been working on a AAA multiplayer title and was overseen by former Halo and Battlefield leads Rosi Zagortcheva and Scott Warner.

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3D Realms and Slipgate Ironworks have reportedly seen staff reductions due to Embracer's ongoing restructuring program.

This is according to social media posts from Apogee Entertainment and 3D Realms founder Scott Miller.

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