Elden Ring one of 2022’s biggest success stories (pic: Bandai Namco) is.

2022 is almost over, but what do you do of the year that Microsoft and Sony have remained silent and the games are not even better than ever?

Were now in the three year olds’ time and yet it looks like it’s a little like it’s almost started. The constant burden of misforgia and global news revealed that while the pandemic still makes a paralysing shadow over the games industry, the cost of living crisis suddenly caused the huge pain that is often done by the poor and distorted worlds of physics and gaming.

While it was not clear that the volume of games released in 2022 was still more impressive than before the pandemic, followed the same pattern as the series of 2021, in the number one game that most of the biggest names have now been released in the first half of the year, since all of them will be delayed since 2020s Christmas. The schedule for 2023 is the same and while the situation has improved each year, the recovery is slow and not a certain extent will be achieved.

While publishers will be as keen as any other way to increase the volume of new games being released it becomes harder to blame the lack of previews and general communication for the pandemic. The presentation of events and the production of demos costs time, so it’s understandable why the cut would be from developers already busy schedules. Many games that do not see such a thing happen today are still alive. One can see how many games were released without serious scrutiny.

That begins to turn more focused, especially given that publishers disapprove of communication with their customers in any way significant. The biggest trends of 2022 were not just the decreased volume of big names, but also the ludicrous lack of news in general. Among the many companies, rumors were rumoured to have picked up some of the slack, but there were barely any announcement of notes from Sony or Microsoft, or, indeed, most of the big publishers.

When Nintendo seems like the most open and talkative publisher, many people know that very strange is going on and it looks like the industry is in a rat state on the way there. That would eventually be the only place where the company decides to keep everything secret until the last minute. Something that it knows has never worked before, but for some reason, want to try again.

What benefit is to expect this to offer isn’t known. Sadly, when EA announced on Wednesday, the release of Need For Speed Unbound began a few weeks ago, it seems strange that a big release like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor seems a bit sloppy, but it’s the silence from Sony and Microsoft that caused the most confusion amongst fans.

Sony began the year by acquiring PlayStation 5 gradually increasing access and major successes with Horizon Forbidden West and Gran Turismo 7. Once they were out, as it was like a veil dropped across the company, with almost no word of their words pending until the end of the year sifting together God Of War Ragnarok and the increasingly ill-timed PlayStation VR2.

Probably they have dozens of other projects underway, but they won’t talk about either or one of them, and even when they do announce something theirs via an anodyne blog, presented with eagerness a resentful schoolchild handing in their breakfast-smudged homework.

Where a dissatisfaction has proven, isn’t a mystery, but it’s not completely unprovoked and can only be a cause of foment for conspiracies. As for odd episodes like the PS Plus reboot, Sony went out of their way to do the wrong thing and made the company run off its system by leaving an entire loss of subscriptions and the strange situation with PS Plus Premium and its almost complete lack of PlayStation 2 and 1 games.

Microsoft spent the majority of the year trying desperately to convince the monopoly investigators that the largest company on the planet is actually a plucky underdog and that buying the biggest third party publisher in the world won’t harm the games industry. Call Of Duty is nothing unique, in fact it’s in a total absence.

At obvious shock, not everyone has given its promise at fair price and theres been so many concessions that Microsoft execs should wonder whether it’s worth the effort.

This year’s lack of announcements is partly due to not wanting to say or do anything to help their chances of acquiring Activision Blizzard, the first time they did that and were almost never releasing this year’s announcements and quietly waited until after the Games Awards to meet their usual promise that the really exciting news will come next year. It’s always next year.

The sheer weight of their money will certainly be a good chance that they can eventually give up, but either way the genie is out of the bottle. For example, as the Microsoft purchase of Bethesda hit on the end of the year, other publishers have joined a land grab of acquisitions that saw multiple publishers snapped up. Meanwhile, those independent like Ubisoft and EA, have clearly stated they are open to offering opportunities.

Now we have the ill-considered prospect that the entire videogame industry will be owned by only a handful of multinational companies, for whom games are just a small part of their business. Its likely the worst Googles Stadia disaster, then unprepared for this year, has stopped such a giant Apple, from moving a part of the gaming industry, but in some cases will only annoy the inevitable.

The industry’s affairs will be unpredictable, so it’s not unusual that 2023 will have the effect on the future of the game game industry. And yet, in most other respects 2022 has been very good. There may not be as many new games as you like, but the ones that were released rarely disappoint.

I can only describe the likes of Elden Ring, Bayonetta 3, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, but in my top 20 of 2022 there have been an incredible number of games that have surprised and impressed the whole whole year.

It was particularly encouraging to see that Elden Ring was not just a critical hit, winning every Game of the Year award in its path, but as a smash and a cavalry smash, as well.

Elden Ring had a top 10 sellers of all time in the USA, and that’s some achievement for a game that doesn’t make the most of the expected concessions of modern gaming — even for its difficult-and-hand-holding qualities. There are no microtransactions, no battle passes or any of the grubby hallmarks of some big name titles.

FromSoftwares Elden Ring is a real game that enjoyed a real success and will hopefully benefit the entire game industry. It was good and people bought it, which in an ideal world would be all of that complex as ever.

Despite all the corporate machinations it was video games that saved 2022 and although it’s certainly good to think that all you need is the reality, unfortunately, undoubtedly, not very simple. Even though a company’s management is still a sign of bad news, it does seem reassuring to know developers haven’t been distracted and their passion and imagination continue to shine through.

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