By Nelson Schneider - 12/21/25 at 03:41 PM CT
It’s been another wild ride as the world hit the mid-way point of the 2020s. We’ve had to deal with the wild pendulum of the Culture Wars alongside Social Media companies being outed as the cancer underlying all of our symptoms and Big Tech continuing to “move fast and break things,” only in this case, the “things” being broken have been the global economy and job market. Of course, Gaming and Nerd Culture weren’t spared from this widespread ruin, resulting in yet another year in which the Fails came easy, while the Wins were hard-won and somewhat subjective.
Top 5 Fails
5. Entertainment Software Association (ESA) Intentionally Blocks Software from Being Perpetually Entertaining
Ever wonder why IP rights and consumer rights always collide in the world of videogames, and especially the preservation of old favorites? It came to light this year that all of this BS is ON PURPOSE, and is committed at the behest of the NGO that is supposed to have the medium’s best interests in mind, but instead is – like a typical lobbyist – fully in the pockets of the corporations.
4. Credit Processors Push for Censorship
In years past, all sorts of nerd hobbies have been subject to censorship. Whether it was the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s attempting to squash Dungeons & Dragons for religiously offensive content or politicians attempting to scapegoat violent content in videogames as the root cause of increasing violence among the youth, it seemed like there was always someone out to get us. In 2025, those “someones” were the biggest credit card processing corporations in the world, who suddenly had the idea put into their heads by Woke activists in Australia (of all places) that there is waaaay too much (hetero) sexual content in videogames. The result was a massive cluster-EFF of storefronts like Steam and Itch.io de-listing games right and left if they had so much as a whiff of something that might be appealing to the Male Gaze (and not the Male Gays).
3. Nintendo’s Overbearing Lawfare
For a long time, it seemed like Nintendo was the last of the console makers who wasn’t completely infested with corporate greed and evil, selfish motivations. Unfortunately, that era ended with the death of Iwata and the retirement of Reggie, with the new generation of Nintendo executives doing everything in their power to burn down the company’s reputation. Expanding far beyond their traditional – and perpetual – game of Whack-A-Mole with the emulation community, this year Nintendo revealed not only an insanely draconian EULA for their new console, but also started trying to squash their competition by exploiting the worldwide patent system with ludicrously vague patents that completely ignore glaringly obvious cases of Prior Art.
2. Windows 11 Tries to Kill Windows 10
Windows 11 was released a couple years ago, but failed to gain widespread adoption, largely due to its insane system requirements – including the cutting edge TPM 2.0 motherboard module. In 2025, Microsoft finally grew tired of continuing to support Windows 10, officially ending updates and security patches, seemingly in an attempt at forcing the majority of Windows 10 users to upgrade to Windows 11. That... didn’t exactly go over well, and the company was forced to extend an offer of an extra year of security updates – without feature updates that nobody actually wants – to Windows 10 users.
Meanwhile, a huge number of Windows 10 users – not wanting to deal with the AI-infested, Cloud-powered, subscription-driven abomination of Windows 11 – decided to check out Linux instead. While 2025 may not officially have been the Christ-like-long-awaited Year of the Linux Desktop, it was the biggest thing to happen to Linux in the 20 years since neckbeards started waiting for the Year of the Linux Desktop. Even I – an avowed hater of Linux since being required to install Red Hat and Apache on demo hardware as part of my Webmaster Certification process in 2002 – decided to give the Free Open-Source Software (FOSS) OS a second look... and it’s not bad (I’ve been writing my reviews and blogs on it for a couple months).
If Valve keeps pushing the envelop with Linux gaming, even with Microsoft releasing a Big Picture-style alternate UI for Windows 11, Microsoft might very well find itself losing PC gaming completely.
1. Everything (is an) Xbox
Back in March, Bobby Kotick, freed from his redundant position at Activision-Blizzard as it dissolved within the fetid guts of the Xbox Division, flat-out said that Microsoft should get out of the Gaming business. And everything that happened at MS and the Xbox Division throughout the year proved that Mr. Kotick (and I) was right. Every game the Xbox Division released in 2025 flopped, the company raised prices on Xbox hardware not once but twice, the key feature of the XBONE was quietly discontinued, and Gamepass caused Activision’s biggest annualized release – ‘Call of Duty’ – to LOSE $300 million instead of actually making money. If Xbox was any other console-maker, they would have died out after a single terrible generation, or maybe could have hung-on for a second go-around. But thanks to Microsoft’s near-infinite money, Xbox has been running for DECADES like a startup burning venture capital, and those flaming chickens have finally come home to roost, setting everything they touch on fire.
Top 5 Wins
5. Nintendo Launches Switch 2, Fanboys Say, “Yay,” World at Large Says, “Why?”
Nintendo released the not-particularly-awaited sequel to their first hybrid console/handheld gaming platform in the Switch 2. It sold, to quote Chris, ‘a massive fuckton of consoles,’ in spite of the fact that it barely has any Launch Window exclusives to speak of. Forbes reported that the Switch 2 sold TWICE AS FAST as the original Switch, despite costing $150 more. These kinds off numbers are shocking, and must include an overwhelming amount of Nintendo fanboys double-dipping on this thing, since it’s inconceivable that there are 10 million people who never played “Breath of the Wild” or “Tears of the Kingdom” on the original Switch because they didn’t have good enough frame-rates.
4. “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” Stands Alongside “Baldur’s Gate 3” in Setting ‘Unrealistic’ Indie Standards for “AAA” Corpos to Match
For the second time in 3 years, a ‘small’ team of ‘Indie’ developers – who all would have been classified as Single-A studios in the sane world we lived in prior to the idiocy of the modern era – managed to completely dominate The Game Awards and other Game of the Year listicles across the Internet, by releasing a high-quality Turn-Based RPG with good writing, slick presentation, and fairly traditional gameplay mechanics, proving that the genre that built the Golden Age of the ‘90s still has legs. Square-Enix is reportedly “aware” of this situation, while other “AAA” studios are butthurt – again – because “Expedition 33” is setting more of those unrealistic standards that “Baldur’s Gate 3” was guilty of, raising the bar for quality RPGs from lying flat on the ground (where other RPG devs have still failed to jump over it for many, many years).
3. The Stop Killing Games Movement Gains Ground in Europe
In the modern era of mostly-digital and significantly-online gaming, there has been a disgruntling trend of mostly-single-player games being rendered unplayable due to an online server somewhere being turned off. Even more distressing is the increasing number of games being de-listed from digital storefronts for mostly legalistic BS reasons. Why should a digital product – which can be duplicated infinitely – ever need to be removed from sale, or, indeed, be said to ‘run out of stock’? One organization in Europe – Stop Killing Games – has taken up this banner in the constant battle against corporations for basic consumer rights. In 2025, not only did Stop Killing Games gain the attention of Gamers enough to enter the gaming zeitgeist, but it caught the attention of the European Commission, who might be able to bring some culpability to the predatory publishers behind all of these anti-games-preservation shenanigans... provided that the European Commission doesn’t drown in its own bureaucratic bloat first.
2. Sony Signals Intentions to Back-Off from Hardware
While Nintendo was busy selling consoles (with no games) hand over fist, Sony decided to buck that trend and signaled that they were more interested in developing their “community” and expanding their endeavors of making their games available on competing platforms instead of rushing to release another new console. A wise decision following on the flop that was last year’s PlayStation 5 Pro launch.
1. The Big 3 Have Fallen!
Well, it finally happened! After decades of Western Gaming being locked in a stranglehold by the three worst possible publishers – Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft – that Triumvirate has finally collapsed. It started with Microsoft’s acquisition of Activition a couple years ago – which it fed to the Xbox Division and largely destroyed. But this year, the other two fell like dominoes. First, Ubisoft shattered in half, announcing that it was spinning off most of its big IPs into a secondary publisher owned mostly by Chinese mega-investor, Tencent. Then, not much later in the year, EA followed suit, selling itself in its entirety to a variety of shady private equity firms and the Saudi prince. Activision has never been less relevant than it has since being digested by Xbox, and if the pattern holds, Ubisoft and EA will have next to no relevance in the future of gaming, allowing smaller publishers and Indies to dominate in a gaming landscape where these giant corporate buttholes aren’t constantly sucking all the oxygen out of the room.
