It’s been a year of incredible, incredible highs — this was the year we saw a small unknown team take everyone by surprise with their debut masterpiece, Clair Obscur. This was the year where Metal Gear Solid came back, and the year that Silent Hill got its first original entry in over a decade – and it turned out to be good! This was the year that Kojima put out another masterpiece in Death Stranding 2, and the year that Donkey Kong returned to the scene with a literal hit. Silksong came out this year, and it was fantastic! Metroid Prime 4 came out this year!
So many great things happened that it feels almost ungrateful to be negative about video games after all that. And yet, in spite of how amazing the games themselves have been, this year also had some really dismal lows — and those are all owed to the platform holders who are tasked to be the custodians of the industry.
Make no mistake about it — for as successful as games are now as an industry, and as a creative medium, 2025 probably marks the year that gaming consoles, long a stalwart and hallmark of the medium, found themselves on shakier ground than ever before. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all variously shot themselves in the foot through the year, making it really hard to root for any of them, with the poor and baffling decisions they kept making.
In fact, let’s get this out of the way — if you really want to know which platform holder “won” this year, the only one we’d feel comfortable talking about without feeling icky and gross about validating some pretty poor decisions, is Valve and Steam, who, like every year, entrenched themselves into the hearts and minds of video game fans the world over, and made some major, bold moves that see them in more direct competition with the other three than they have ever been. Especially with their new hardware announcements, they brought a lot of excitement to their platform. Valve and Steam both have their own issues, of course, particularly when it comes to content moderation, but on the whole, they’re the only platform holders who did well without caveats this year.
Which brings us to the rest of them. This piece, of course, is about the console manufacturers, so those are the three we’re going to focus on for the remainder. And that’s where… actually you know what, let’s save everyone some time and remove Microsoft from the competition right now.
If ever a platform holder has had a period of time where their continued participation in the industry was in question, Xbox’s 2025 would be it. Microsoft opened the floodgates on third party publishing this year, making it clear that ALL their games will hit PS5 (at the very least) going forward. This even extended to Halo, Gears, and Forza – the three pillars of the Xbox brand. Microsoft announcing Halo would be on PlayStation going forward was a surreal moment, akin to seeing Sonic on a Nintendo platform after Sega exited the hardware market following the Dreamcast’s failure.
Microsoft’s continued indication to all customers that there is no need for Xbox hardware to play Xbox games ended up becoming a an expected outcome. Sales of Xbox, which had already been in free fall, declined even now precipitously this year, with Xbox consoles being outsold not just by the eight year old Nintendo Switch, which has its successor out on the market already, but in some territories, even being outsold by niche VR and PC handheld hardware.
Several retailers the world over even started to make moves to discontinue carrying Xbox hardware entirely — this is something you only see when your sales are Dreamcast or Wii U level poor, to be clear. That’s how badly Microsoft fumbled Xbox this year.
The sad part is it didn’t have to turn out like this. Ironically enough, after more than a decade of hyping up their games output and various initiatives like Game Pass, this was the year where things finally came together for Microsoft — their first parties put out several major, largely well received, games, while Game Pass was offering major bangers, including some of the most hyped games of the year in Clair Obscur and Silksong, day and date. Of course, we’re ignoring the several price increases (for hardware AND services, and even an attempted increase for games) along the way — but that only serves to reinforce the infuriating schism between Microsoft’s game output and their business decisions.
With Microsoft being out, the other two are a lot closer to each other. In terms of pure sales, Sony had a great year with the PS5 outperforming its sales in 2024. This, incidentally, was in spite of Sony, rather than because of them, because they chose this year to increase the price of the PS5 hardware globally AGAIN. There were some regional exceptions — the U.S. never saw a price increase, while Japan saw a region locked cheaper model introduced — but other than that, five years into the PS5’s life, we are continuing to see prices increase, rather than come down as they would in a sane world.
Console pricing wasn’t the only thing Sony increased this year either, as PS Plus prices continued to increase in several markets around the world, such as Canada and Australia. Sony also made some decisions that generated concern among their fanbase, such as the decision to release a PlayStation published game in Helldivers 2 on Xbox.
In fact, through the entire year, Sony and PlayStation were marred by small scale controversies — whether that was poor performance and support for PS5 Pro by several games, or them sending mixed signals about when to expect the PS6 (and making no one happy in the process), State of Play events that disappointed multitudes of fans… In fact, arguably the only thing Sony and PlayStation got right this year were the actual games.
This is the one area Sony almost always delivers on, and to their credit, they kept that going this year as well. Sony saw two flagship releases for the PS5 this year, with Death Stranding 2 and Ghost of Yotei. Both of these games were very well received, both sold well, and both are garnering accolades and acclaim on the awards circuit already.
This was on top of their existing games, like Astro Bot, Gran Turismo 7, and Helldivers 2, which all got great continued post launch support as well. And on top of that, the PS5 remained the best console to play most games on, with PlayStation versions of most third party games read performing better on the base PS5, when compared to the competition. Much like with Xbox, the actual games output was fine — it was the other areas that drew ire.
This is sort of a theme in this whole piece, because it also holds true for Nintendo. Nintendo had an extremely eventful year — this was the year that the long awaited Nintendo Switch 2 finally launched, which would make one think, ordinarily, that they’d have it in the bag. But Nintendo made a lot of decisions along the way that proved to be unpopular — from becoming the first publisher to adopt $80 pricing for video games with Mario Kart World, to adopting Sony’s model for paid cross gen upgrades, to high pricing for hardware and accessories across the board, to unpopular DLC policies…
The one area where Nintendo always delivers is games, and in 2025, they… mostly did that. Mostly. I’d argue 2025 was actually an uncharacteristically poor showing from Nintendo on the games front, at least compared to their own standards. They put out several games — Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, Pokemon Legends ZA, Hyrule Warriors, Kirby Air Riders, Metroid Prime 4… and except Bananza, which is one of the best games of the year, all of the games were disappointing or divisive in some way or the other.
I’d argue their output this year is still better than Microsoft and Sony, because they had more games out, and because they have the highest rated game out between the three — but it’s actually a surprisingly poor showing from a company that otherwise reliably delivers hits. We are also not talking about games like Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour and Drag X Drive, both of which were very poorly received and represent some of the worst reviewed Nintendo games ever.
Where the Switch 2 did surprisingly well was third party support. Now, over the Switch generation, Nintendo managed to rebuild their third party relations, and with the Switch 2 being a far more capable platform, and Xbox in particular imploding, it’s not a surprise to see that continue here. However, even here, Nintendo made some baffling decisions, withholding development kits, or in some cases even announcements of Switch 2 versions of third party games.
However, in a lot of regards, third parties shone on the Switch this year. Multiple third party publishers seem to have communicated and indicated that the Switch 2 is part of their multiplatform pipeline going forward. Hell, it was announced Resident Evil Requiem day and date for the Switch 2, which is arguably the biggest show of third party support the system could have gotten other than GTA6 being announced for it. And, as with the original Switch, indies continued to thrive on the platform, with Silksong and Hades 2 (the latter being console exclusive for Switch and Switch 2) being particular highlights.
What’s also interesting is that, for all the unpopular decisions Nintendo made this year — and there were so many — their performance on the market never slowed down. In fact, it did the opposite and it accelerated. In spite of a truncated marketing cycle and a lot of backlash from enthusiasts, the Switch 2 broke pretty much every record in the book for a console launch, selling 3.5 million units in three days (something no other system in history has managed) and over 10 million units in four months, keeping a pace of sales far beyond any other platform in history.
What made this doubly impressive was that the Switch 2 sold this much in spite of a somewhat lacking lineup — it had Mario Kart and Pokemon Legends, yes, but both were criticized by fans of the respective series, and none of the other releases are major commercial hits. This means that Nintendo still has its biggest system sellers — Mario, Zelda, Animal Crossing, mainline Pokemon — to come, and sales are already this high. It indicates that Nintendo handled this generational transition well, that they have created an ecosystem where players want to stick around, and where they are willing to buy the hardware on faith that the games will come, not unlike PlayStation.
Based on the Switch 2’s explosive sales, as well as Nintendo’s lineup being better than either competitor (if still being weaker than Nintendo’s own prior showings), I suppose if I had to pick a platform holder that “won” 2025, it would be Nintendo. But I want to make it known thar I am not happy about this at all, and that I’m awarding Nintendo this “win” under protest.
Their litany of business decisions this year were deeply exploitative and alarming, and the only reason that doesn’t put them in last place is that, somehow, the competition was at least as bad as them on this front. Corny as it sounds, this year is a prime example of “whoever wins, we all lose”. Nintendo may have won the console war this year, but they’ve made a lot of people very unhappy along the way, just like Microsoft and Sony also have.
For 2026 and onwards, let’s at the very least hope that these console manufacturers can keep their greed in check at least a little bit. But with a whole third of the console market taking itself out of the running, and the sheer state of the hardware components market at the present moment in time, something tells me things might in fact be about to get a whole lot worse.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.