The 10 Biggest Gaming Disappointments Of 2025

I’d hoped 2025 would be a better year than 2024. And in some personal ways, it was. But it was also yet another year filled with layoffs, AI slop, greedy execs, price increases, and more signs that the entire game industry is collapsing. So, like we’ve done in years past , Kotaku has rounded up a collection of some of the worst, most disappointing video game news and events from 2025 and catalogued it in a handy dandy list. Take breaks as you scroll through this, and let’s all hope 2026 is better. It can’t be worse, right? Please, tell me it can’t be worse. Please... So Many Canceled Games This was the year in which, more than ever before, a lot of big games got canned, or we learned about projects that were binned not long ago. Perfect Dark, the slick-looking reboot of Rare’s sci-fi shooter series? Canned, and the studio behind it shuttered. A Wonder Woman game from Monolith? Canceled taking the beloved studio behind No One Lives Forever and Shadow of Mordor down with it. An EA-published game from some former Monolith devs that would have reportedly featured a version of Black Panther Mordor’s popular Nemesis System? Dead and the studio behind it closed, too. EA also shelved a spin-off; Sony killed a few live-service games, Titanfall extraction shooter including a ; and God of War multiplayer project a cool-looking game from Splash Damage got the axe this year, leading to, you guessed it, layoffs. Transformers And these are just the ones that we know about. I’d bet a lot more games were canceled in 2025 as publishers continue to focus more and more on fewer franchises that can be reliably counted on to turn a profit. And as noted, many of these cancellations led to layoffs and studios being closed, a problem worth talking about separately, because in 2025, these cuts and closings happened a lot. More Layoffs And Studio Closings 2025 wasn’t as bad for industry layoffs as 2024, but it was still pretty terrible. Nearly 10,000 developers lost jobs, according to layoff tracker Amir Satvat . That’s down from the over 15,000 pink-slips peak of 2025, but still up from 2022. The big cutbacks were once again at Microsoft, which shaved hundreds of jobs across its gaming division, including at Rare, Zenimax, and King. But those were hardly the only ones. Notable teams like Cloud Chamber, working on BioShock 4, lost dozens of staff, Amazon Gaming cut over 100 positions, and Square Enix made cuts across its international publishing business. Indies were also still hit hard. Heart Machine had to lay people off and end Hyper Light Breaker Early Access development early, while Wreckreation maker Three Fields Entertainment turned to Patreon as it looks for new funding . Randomly looking up the developer behind Floppy Knights to see what they were working on next, only to find a shutdown notice on their homepage, pretty much summed up the ongoing industry vibe. - Ethan Gach...

Preview: ~500 words