• Editor Dann Sullivan sits down on a bench to discuss the past year
• It’s been a year of extremes, as we tend to say every year
• This year’s summits show the future is not as bleak as it seems

Well, we’re now at the end of the (Gregorian) year, so it’s the perfect time to look back at 2024, which is turning out to be one of the most eventful years in the industry’s history video game. I decided that this year’s retrospective should go beyond the state of the industry to also include the website and what current trends and developments mean for the future of mobile gaming.

• If you’re looking for something lighter, like a list of our favorite games throughout the year (as perhaps teased by the header), check out our list of the best mobile games of 2024.

This marks the end of my fifth year running the consumer side of editorial production at Steel Media (internally we have B2B and B2C divisions, and while I strafe them to some extent, most of my time is spent to our player-focused sites). . This has been the strangest year yet.

Back when I first started writing about games, I did it on a site that myself and a few friends started. It was 2011, and at the time I was still working in retail (GAME, the UK’s leading video game retailer). I worked there for several years and I always appreciated that people came back and shared their happiness following my recommendations. With the shift to digital (and the joyful spread of indie) and the emergence of more and more independent publishers and media outlets online, my group of friends decided to give it a try.

• It’s impossible to talk about 2024 without mentioning layoffs across the industry, which surpassed 2023 early in the year and continued in full swing throughout the year. For an overview of the numbers and damage, see pocketgamer.biz layoffs label.

Well, in 12 or 13 years, most of these independent publishers are gone. It’s been slow, but more and more outlets have closed and, due to changes in how advertising and search engines work, it’s something that seems to have accelerated during my time at Steel Media – especially in the last eight/nine months. .

I’ve seen sites I idolized change hands multiple times before turning to dust, and there’s not much left from previous generations of independent media either. That said, today we are witnessing a renaissance of smaller, independent and fan-funded media. So there is some hope that trend-setting, recommendation-driven, and review-driven media will persist, but they won’t have the same names as before.

Pocket-sized persistence

That said – and this is not a boast or gloat – we have held our ground over the last three tumultuous years in terms of “traffic”, brushed by the road accidents that have gutted the biggest publishers. We did this by changing the type of articles we write: ramping up reviews, launching more regular features, and restoring the podcast.

We’ve also had the support of a great sales team, technical team and central operations team – and have also benefited from our incredible Pocket Gamer Connects events and all the access and fringe events that they bring.

The site has also undergone some changes, as many of our regular readers will have noticed. We’ve made some changes to how and where we write things, resulting in clearer URLs and titles as well as the addition of highlights sections (where I refer to myself -even in the third person above). Our layout has also changed slightly, making our homepage a more organized destination. We’re going back to the days of magazines, so why shouldn’t we be able to represent that on short notice?

Pocket Gamer, through our parent company, Steel Media, has always thrived on its ability to pivot toward (and invite discussion about) the next big thing. Sometimes this includes touchscreen, AppStores, subscriptions, Battle Passes, microtransactions, online stores, XR as well as recent, slightly more controversial topics like NFTs, Blockchain and AI.

AI has always been at the heart of how video games innovate (intelligence is, of course, in the eye of the beholder) and “pathfinding”, “adaptive programming” and “procedural generation” are all AI, according to the game’s original definition). However, as the world’s leading search engine (along with some more questionable entities) attempts to replace the human-written word with generated content, it makes things trickier for the media. AI Slope (finalist for Oxford University Press Word of the Year 2024) is making things more and more difficult, and that’s why so many media outlets are turning to deliberately creating “more human” content rather than trying to make do with both the slope and churn of news sites. more important guides. We are there with them.

But what about the industry?

The last few years have been fun to say the least, and 2024 has been a continuation of a lot of big challenges that have rocked developers, publishers, and mobile platforms over the course of 2023.

We’ve seen Apple’s privacy sandbox completely upend how advertising works (it turns out people will choose not to share data when given the choice), which has changed how advertising works. targeted advertising and disrupted the hypercasual landscape.

We also saw Epic’s war against Duopoly continue, and it also ushered in, sparking the EU’s desire for regulation and moderation as well as their (fairly respectful in 2024) aversion to monopolies. However, it is increasingly clear that Epic’s war to open up the ecosystem is going to cost them (and their backers at Tencent) dearly over time, and will be years of grueling trench warfare battles. . Apple’s opening to the EU is a success, but other regional and national governments are not as picky as the EU.

That said, just two weeks ago Epic reached a huge goal that only a few outlets covered: Epic struck a deal with Telefónica (o2, Movistar, Vivo). While this isn’t Epic’s ultimate goal – the ability to be downloaded and used freely on all mobile devices, without any restrictions or fees – it skips this step by pre-installing it on phones. For us here in the UK, existing mergers and impending deals extend o2 (and subsequently Epic) to Virgin Media, Vodafone and Three – all major players. While a deal with Telefónica doesn’t instantly lay the groundwork for this pre-installation situation to spread further, it certainly opens doors, and I know we’ll see more of this in 2025.

What even East a mobile game?

Back when I still worked in stores and when Pocket Gamer was in its infancy, a mobile game had to be downloaded through a semi-artificial series of texting and entering details. Pocket Gamer published magazines in a number of UK mobile stores explaining how to download them and which ones were best to collect.

A few years later, we had Apple and Google’s own App Stores. The Internet was thriving and phone technology had exploded: we had full-featured web browsers and an easy interface with our smartphones. Then came APK stores, and eventually alternative online stores. However, aside from sideloading, we have also recently started to see an increase in streaming and subscriptions.

In 2025, we will have titles like Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero and Infinity Nikki on the market, all of which have players moving freely between mobile and PC. At the same time, games that cut their teeth on mobile – like Clash of Clans and Subway Surfers – are now available on PC via Google Play Games. I played Netease’s Badlanders and Lilith’s Rise of Kingdoms on my PC and phone.

Next year we will see the launch of the Microsoft store after its delay from July this year, the giant took Swipe on Apple’s 30% fees in Septembershortly before launching their “It’s an Xbox” campaignwhich posited that everything from a phone to a PC (anything with a browser) will be able to access the Xbox ecosystem.

This happened while Nintendo continued to play with mobile, Sega was doubling down (they bought Rovio) and most major publishers continue to develop in this area. That and, let’s not forget, Microsoft now not only has Activision and Blizzard, but also King.

Of course, much of this is not new. We’ve been talking about big names getting into mobile for years, but people don’t really understand why. This isn’t just because mobile is often the battleground for new monetization mechanics and techniques, but it’s because you can scale mobile to console, to PC and beyond. . but reducing the PC or console… it’s more difficult.

So, now that everything (Discord, Netflix, Telegram, The New York Times… even LinkedIn) is a platform and – thanks to Microsoft and friends – is back, and instant gaming is on the rise and subscriptions are more relevant than ever. Mobile games East will change, but it will be those inside the ecosystem who will lead it, using these other technologies.

Once again (i)towards the Breach

If you look at the popular 2018 turn-based strategy (and one of our COO’s personal favorites), Into the Breach, you can see the single-screen singularity we’re entering. You can play it on Switch, you can play it on iOS and Android and you can also play it on Xbox, Playstation and PC. This is made easier by self-publishing and a series of partnerships, but best of all, thanks to casting from your phone, you can play it on anything from your phone to the cinema (or, probably bigger if you have a nice projector). You can of course run it natively through any of the other devices.

As this little device in your hand gets smarter and more powerful, it’s likely to bog down most other slower gaming mediums like consoles – although I don’t think 2025 will be the year for that. I think something we’ll be watching closely here at Pocket Gamer is how the Steam Deck encourages “high-tech, big-budget” publishers to adopt a “minimum” generational spec similar to console generations, and what this will mean wider adoption of “mobile” teams and “mainstream” development philosophies.

Either way, 2024 is coming to an end and we’ve had an eventful year, but the future looks bright and exciting. Maybe we never left the creative “Wild West” in this industry, and it’s time to fully embrace it again, especially here in the wild world of mobile.