One one hand, it feels like gaming is speeding up. New genres can go out of fashion before you've even clocked them, and there's always some new fad or trend shaking things up, for better or worse. On the other hand, game development remains relatively slow in many cases, and what's familiar still reigns supreme.
One of the biggest influences of the past decade is a 45-year-old game called Rogue. Other contradictions complicate attempts to understand how gaming is changing and where it's going, like how the successful mainstream games industry kicked thousands of workers out the door over the past couple years. We started Trend Watch late last year as way to collect these big movements, and as Wes said the other day , it feels like a major change is incoming.
I won't try to predict the exact nature of that big change—even making small predictions is foolhardy, but at the start of every year we do our best to forecast some of the gaming trends and happenings we expect to see over the 12 months to come. Here's what the PC Gamer team came up with for 2025. For more on the year ahead, check out or big list of new games releasing in 2025 .
The Epic Games launcher gets a huge overhaul and actually becomes a useable contender to Steam I feel like if there is one thing that can get us to put down our pitchforks and agree as a collective, it's that the Epic Games Store sucks to use. The free games are great, of course. But actually accessing and playing them is such a headache that .
