The moments set to shape video games in 2025
If there’s one thing video games love, it’s a marketing beat. Some major publishers and platform holders have settled into quite regular rhythms, spacing announcements out across the year in quarterly chunks. Some have a specific day they use every year without fail.
Beyond the straight marketing though, 2025 looks set to be a year of moments. This will be a make-or-break year for the traditional triple-A tentpole, the year we get a new Nintendo console, and the year we get Grand Theft Auto 6. There will be all the typical moments – your Summer Game Fests and your Gamescoms – but inevitably, and no doubt most excitingly, there will be surprises, be they official announcements, major reports, or defining conversations and developments that drive the conversation of the year ahead.
Below, we’ve mapped out the key moments we know about – and what we know about the less-certain ones we can hopefully expect – to give you an idea of how things might shape out. Here’s the year ahead in video games for 2025 – and here’s to a few more positive surprises this year than in the one gone by.
CES (Consumer Electronics Show)
Date: 7th – 10th January 2025
CES isn’t a typical mark-it-in-your-diary event for major video game news, being an event you’d typically associate with impossibly expensive TVs and smart toasters in years gone by. But with Nvidia becoming the ultimate stock market darling in 2024, thanks to its big push into AI and the continuing hype that follows, CES is gaining a bit more relevance for video game folks. There have already been some big reveals at 2025’s show, namely the new line of 50-series graphics cards, while eager accessory manufacturers are causing a deluge of Switch 2 leaks as they show off their wares. This is now a show where the first markers for the year are put down – or at least, the first big questions asked. Will AI become increasingly essential to the graphics performance of major video games? Will the Switch 2 really launch by April? The bold claims made on stage here will no doubt set the tone for the year ahead regardless. We’ll be reporting on the news as it breaks, and Digital Foundry will have all their expert tech analysis with you very soon. –
The February triple-A rush
Date: February 2025
Even accounting for the usual delays from Q4 into the following new year, the February release schedule is absolutely chock-a-block in 2025. Running straight on from Citizen Sleeper 2 and Sniper Elite: Resistance in late January, February kicks off on the 4th with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, then rolls straight into Civilization 7 on the 11th, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows on the 14th (romantic backstab anyone?), Avowed on the 18th, Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii on the 21st and Monster Hunter Wilds on the 28th. There are more in between, but those are proper, major triple-A releases. After a relatively barren 2024 for big, blockbuster games (though there were plenty of games), this year’s kicking off with the opposite. How well these games fair – each of them, aside from perhaps Like A Dragon, a major bet from their relative studios – will likely be a bellwether for the year ahead. Given how 2024 was for most of this industry, let’s hope this one starts with a bang.
Date: 27th February 2025
After a quiet-ish 2024 – the mega success of Pokémon TCG Pocket aside of course – this year looks set to be a big one for Pokémon, which remains not only the largest gaming franchise but the largest in the world. Each year on ‘Pokémon Day’, the anniversary of Red and Green’s 1996 launch in Japan, the Pokémon Company organises a Nintendo Direct-style showcase of the year ahead. The tentpole game we know about already is Pokémon Legends: Z-A, a curiously-titled follow-up to the popular main series spinoff, Pokémon Legends: Arceus. The big question marks will be over its platform – or – with Pokémon historically avoiding any main series releases within the first few series of new hardware.
