2023's best and worst in gaming: A year in review for an Entertainment writer

^{Image: Remedy Games}

Was 2023 the best year of all time for gaming? Maybe!

I played a lot of games in 2023, which is rather compulsory if you’re a person who writes about games for a living. I am such a person, and can confidently say that I really did play a lot of games this year. I didn’t realise just how much media I’d consumed until games companies started pumping out ‘Spotify Wrapped’-like collections of statistics about my gaming habits at the tail end of the year. Rather than shy away from this horrifying number-based breakdown of my life in 2023 however, why not use this opportunity to talk about all things gaming in 2023? It’s been a great year for players, but not so much for developers. 

Here’s a year in review for gaming in 2023:

Baldur’s Gate 3 and the great avalanche of games

First, the elephant in the room: Larian Studios’ Dungeons & Dragons-based RPG Baldur’s Gate 3, which follows a group of misfits trying to stop themselves from turning into mind flayers at the brink of apocalypse. PlayStation claims that I’ve spent 119 hours playing this game in 2023, which I realise is a paltry number when stacked against anyone else who’s done more than one playthrough, but I haven’t even finished the game yet! I’m still running around tying up loose ends in Act 3, after taking several detours in the massive month of September to play Starfield, Resident Evil 4: Separate Ways, Mortal Kombat 1, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and Counter-Strike 2, among others. 

In October, I played Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Alan Wake 2. These were all on my must-play list when starting out the year, but I certainly wasn’t expecting all of them to come together like some kind of time-sucking gaming cornucopia. Still, all these detours ended up paying off. It was satisfying to see Larian come out with massive patches introducing mid-game customisation, massive epilogues, huge fixes and more while I was still sitting pretty in Act 2. I dread finishing this game only to learn that even more fixes and additional content have been added in after the fact. I’ve already missed out on getting Minthara in the party for this playthrough! What a blow.

Other games I spent a lot of time playing this year

My two main platforms of choice are the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with the Nintendo Switch dropping out of competition entirely thanks to my Joy-Cons failing me during an intense boss battle in Metroid Dread. I’ll just wait for the Nintendo Switch 2 at this point, though it pains to miss out on obviously great games like Super Mario Bros. Wonder and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom this year. I blame the joysticks!

Xbox happens to have its own year in review, as does PlayStation. Looking at the two together, it appears my second-most played game in 2023 was none other than Bethesda’s sci-fi open-world game Starfield at 71 hours. Now, Starfield is a game that can clearly be played for far longer - but right now, I feel satisfied at how much good stuff I scooped out of the game, and I’ll come back to wrap up loose ends whenever its first expansion drops. 

Final Fantasy 16 was my third-most played game of the year, with 57 hours of playtime in total. I really wanted to do a complete playthrough of this, so I don’t think I missed any sidequests or monster hunts - hence the elongated playtime. The campaign is much shorter if you’re just speeding through main missions, but where’s the fun in that? Those 57 hours are likely to grow once I get my hands on 16’s two expansions, the first of which has been out for a few weeks. Speaking of expansions, I also played God of War Ragnarok: Valhalla this month. Holy smokes, don’t get spoiled on that one! Greek-era fans will be pleased as punch. 

I’ll go through the rest of my 2023 gaming quickly here. I put 56 hours into Overwatch 2 this year, usually playing through one season before taking the next one off. I love the game, but I don’t love the idea of grinding through its battle passes throughout the year. My solution is to just come back whenever there’s a battle pass worth getting, but if I’m being honest, that hasn’t happened since its Dungeons & Dragons-themed Season 5. Mauga just got added to the game, but I’m deadset on finishing up Baldur’s Gate 3, so the Samoan beefcake will have to wait until 2024. 

Shockingly, I put less time into Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (31 hours) than I did in Resident Evil 4 (33 hours). The latter number is likely inflated due to its later Separate Ways expansion, but I remember Jedi: Survivor being fairly long on its own. I certainly didn’t do everything I could have done in that game, like collecting all of Cal Kestis’ costumes, lightsaber parts and skills, but I really enjoyed the adventure all the same. It has one of my favourite bossfights of the year! As for Resident Evil 4, that game and its jiggling Regeneradors live rent-free in my head always. I love it to bits. 

I have one last game I’d like to talk about: Alan Wake 2! This game took me 23 hours to beat, and I know for a fact that I didn’t collect all of its manuscripts and assorted collectibles, so that number could’ve been higher. I wasn’t expecting Remedy’s survival-horror sequel to be quite so long, but it was an utterly enthralling adventure with possibly the most innovation I’ve seen in the medium this year. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 go hand in hand for me, as two games that feel like future touchstones for their respective genres. 

Other (bad) things happened in 2023

2023 was a great year to play videogames, but was it a great year for the videogame industry? Certainly not. Right at the start of the year, Google shut down its cloud streaming service Stadia after multiple promises were made on its success and didn’t pan out whatsoever. Few wouldn’t have seen this coming, but one wonders if this was an early sign of a decline in confidence in the games industry. It was making big bucks during the pandemic and companies scaled up thanks to the profits, but that level of business couldn't be sustained. 

The much-anticipated Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake also looks to be in some trouble, after its overseeing holding company Embracer Group began to collapse in a big way this year. Embracer has been on an ill-advised spending spree for the last four years, scooping up multiple game studios and publishers - from Plaion to THQ Nordic - while also making deals for IP rights to Lord of the Rings. You can’t spend that amount of money without making it back, and Embracer has already shuttered a few of its studios due to just that: Saints Row developer Volition Games is gone, Campfire Cabal is gone, Free Radical Design (TimeSplitters) is gone, and more. In the midst of all this, the Knights of the Old Republic remake continues to shift from one studio to the next, with Saber Interactive currently in charge of the project. 

Saber’s studios aren’t the only ones to see layoffs and closures. The games industry as a whole saw painful job cuts happen left and right this year, with names as big as Rockstar, Ubisoft, Xbox, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Bungie, CD Projekt Red, Amazon and more cutting staff. Making big games is a complicated process that takes a lot of time and involves a lot of people, but that business might not be entirely sustainable due to other factors like $2 billion deals collapsing (Embracer), lower profit margins than expected (Bungie), ‘unrealistic’ spending (Epic Games), or vague structural changes to the company (Riot Games).

Other things that happened this year: Unity tried to charge its game developers per install, only to be met by extreme and immediate backlash leading to its CEO stepping down permanently. E3 died for good after many years of attempts to revive it, with 2021 being its now-final show. Charles Martinet stepped down as the voice of Mario, which seems to be a decision the actor is largely happy with, but nevertheless marks the end of an era. Microsoft finally completed its purchase of Activision-Blizzard-King, and Rockstar Games released its first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6. Insomniac Games was hacked by a ransomware group, causing more than a terabyte of confidential files containing information on upcoming games like Marvel’s Wolverine and an X-Men game to be leaked online. Xbox suffered a similar leak, outlining its future plans for current and next-gen consoles. 

So yes, a lot of good things happened in 2023 for gaming - but a lot of bad things happened too! It’s important to take the good with the bad, and not forget about the people who made the games you love. Likewise, it’s also important to find enjoyment where you can and if it lies in a copy of Alan Wake 2, go forth and enjoy the game without guilt. There’s very little time left to have fun in 2023 so go and do that, and we’ll see where this all takes us next year. Happy holidays!

Curious which of these games we liked playing the most this year? Check out our best games of 2023 here.