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It’s a little over a year since we brought Readwrite Gaming to life here at Readwrite.com. In the 13 months that have passed we have written thousands of pages and had millions and millions of views., breaking news stories, helpful and timely guides as well as the latest gossip from an industry that has, at times, seemed in real trouble for a second year running.
The year that was 2024
That we now accept swingeing layoffs as the norm is not right, because money is still being made by the bucketload by game’s publishers, let’s not kid ourselves. We, as game journalists, should not be held responsible for teams getting the boot, simply because of an average review score.
Nor has it been easy for the games journalism sides of things. Google has been Google and outright destroyed many good sites’ rankings, leading to plunging ad revenue and leading nervous boardrooms to chop entire workforces at a moment’s notice. And that’s before we talk about AI writers taking over the world. Enjoy that.
Hopefully, the 2025 version of this story will be a little different from this one (and indeed last year’s) but I am not holding my breath.
Despite the setbacks the games industry has still managed to crank out some amazing games this year and this article is a salute to the teams that worked and worked, often under stressful circumstances to produce something marvelous. Let’s have a look at some of those achievements before we give out our gongs for 2024.
2024’s worthy mentions
There have been some marvelous games in 2024 as well as games that caught the attention out of nowhere. Here’s a quick rundown of some that made us look twice.
Palworld
The year started with a surprise and controversy. Palworld’s carefree disregard of Nintendo and its Pokemon created havoc, with millions of sales and dubious mods, all while Nintendo’s legal eagles glared down from above, ultimately making their move later in the year, long after Palworld had raked in bazillions of dollars. Underneath that janky initial build was a game that PC players hadn’t been able to play before, never having really been treated to anything quite so like Pokemon before. To say Palworld was just PC Pokemon does it a great disservice though.
It took the best bits of Pokemon and mixed them with the best bits of PC Gaming (er, guns) and captured early 2024’s imagination.
Infinite Craft
At the same time as Pocketpair was making a fortune, a wacky web dev called Neal.fun was watching his Infinite Craft ‘game’ take over browsers all over the world. Dragging boxes onto boxes to make new boxes is an oversimplification, but such was the drive for people to be the first to make new discoveries, and also Donald Trump and Taylor Swift, people just couldn’t stop playing it. It was the ultimate time bandit. And it was plain weird.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
A real tail end Charlie for the end of 2024. The new Indy game made us hark back to the fantastic first couple of movies and, for some of us, remember our childhoods. Super gameplay, puzzles, and looks made the end of the year so much better.
Balatro
A card game? As a game-of-the-year contender? Baltro sold by the bucketload, got people out and out addicted (without the danger of losing money), and swept all before it when it came to just out-and-out playability. If Vampire Survivors took that crown last year, Balatro’s stunning success did it for 2024.
Readwrite’s Gaming’s Games of the Year
We have picked two to get the final gongs. The reason partly being because both games only appeared on their native formats so it seemed unfair to give a PC title game of the year when no console owner could play it. And vice versa with our console choice.
Somehow in all of this Xbox still got left out, but it kinda brought it on itself really with a very strange year.
Console Game of the Year – Astrobot
What a game. If there was a game you currently need to buy a PlayStation for it’s Astobot. It oozes developer love from the second you boot it up. It’s charming, cute, and oh-so-playable. Astrobot scooped the overall Game of the Year at The Game Awards and it’s hard to argue, even if it was slightly more contentious than 2023’s Baldur’s Gate III.
Astrobot is everything a truly great console game should be – including not being able to play it on PC. A remarkable game.
PC Game of the Year – Satisfactory
Boy, oh boy, what a game again. It had been in Early Access development for five years so you could argue it’s not new, but 2024 saw it release its V1 and it scooped the best PC Game at the Golden Joysticks and it just blew up from there.
Taking the genius of Factorio and making it accessible and great-looking was a huge undertaking. The story fit perfectly and the character of your trusty computer sidekick ADA was just perfect. I don’t get as much time to put into games as I once did but the 400 hours I have in Satisfactory in the last few months are a testament to how little attention I have paid my family.
Satisfactory is a magnificent PC game and deserves every ounce of its success.
And on to 2025. Happy New Year.
