So that was a bit of a turbulent year for entertainment media, huh?
I don’t do an annual “top news stories” list, because year-to-year there’s no guarantee there would be enough to even make one; it would also be kind of difficult to rank their impact when certain headlines seem outwardly positive while so many others skew negative. But wow, it sure would have been fun to tackle one in 2024. By the end of March alone there was already enough content to knock out a solid top five, as the three main videogame console manufacturers had already provided more than enough twists and turns.
For now, the standard disappointments format will have to do, which means only stuff that undercut some form of my own personal expectation counts. Hey, if ain’t broke…
The list is once again a top five this year, so I’ve tried to group each entry into some kind of common trend wherever it makes sense. Let’s get this out of the way.
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VR BEST OF 2024 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. Nobody ever agrees with me 100%. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. This is Getting Ridiculous, Ninty
I just have to squeeze in a really personal whinge here. Even though Nintendo were guilty of moves much more worthy of other people’s disappointment shortlists this year, I’ve been following the company for so long now that nothing really gets my hopes up enough to shatter them these days – except the ongoing absence of the Nintendo Switch successor console in any official capacity throughout 2024.
The death by 1000 cuts started early: all the way back in January those sensational “internal delay” reports broke, suggesting the machine was planned for release this year but was pushed into 2025. Widespread assumptions that the house of Mario wouldn’t have enough games to fill out another year without a “Switch 2” were gradually proven wrong – and definitively so in a stellar June Direct – but even as the year rolled on and the system’s absence proved those January reports more likely every day, all the hype-fuelled YouTube channels and outlets turned their attention to the possibility that at least we’d see an official reveal this year… Right?
But things got real weird in the year’s second half. When Nintendo crammed a Museum Direct AND an unprecedented double-feature Indie World / Partner Showcase into the final week of August, a console reveal in the traditionally blockbuster September seemed almost guaranteed, but instead we got tumbleweeds; even a set of credible hardware photo / render leaks didn’t expedite Nintendo’s plans. Then came the weirdest October in recent memory: a new Nintendo alarm clock, a sort-of-secret online playtest for a mysterious multiplayer game, and a new mobile music streaming app each came out of nowhere and released almost immediately. Nintendo was trolling fans at that point.
I’m usually an absolute glutton for videogame console speculation, but by November I had well and truly checked out. This disappointment was largely self-inflicted, I admit, but whatever chaos was going on behind the scenes, the Big N’s marketing machine well and truly knew what it was doing.
4. The Wrong Kind of Aussie Film Nostalgia
It’s been a little while since living in Australia has felt like an outright disadvantage for active cinema movie-watchers, but 2024 had me feeling like the old days had returned on at least two oddly similar occasions throughout the year. To be fair, the second instance was a bit more worldwide, but it still formed a nasty pattern from my perspective.
Around April, the latest in a weirdly rapid-fire line of pulpy Guy Ritchie action flicks was set to release, and despite the relatively poor reception of his recent work I was still keen to switch my brain off and enjoy the unique brand of banter he so regularly delivers. But after release date listings all over reliable sites mysteriously vanished one day with no explanation, it was weeks until my friends and I were able to get any answers as to why The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare was not showing in any cinemas, despite Ritchie’s last effort making its slot on time as expected. Apparently it was a weird Amazon deal that wasn’t made massively public in Australia, and a couple of months later the movie unceremoniously hit streaming services. Just what a silly bombastic WWII movie needed. Yay.
Then in September came something even more drastic: I saw (and enjoyed) trailers for George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s much-hyped Oceans reunion Wolfs more than once in cinemas, and marked its late September release date on the calendar. Just one week before that very release date, chief bankroller Apple announced that the movie would no longer receive a cinematic run at all, going straight to the Apple TV+ streaming service instead to help boost subscribers. In terms of late rug-pulls, I’d never seen anything quite like it, but the gambit appeared to work, resulting in huge early watch numbers. Soon enough a major consequence came to light: director Jon Watts revealed he dropped plans for a sequel as a direct response to that exact big-screen backflip. Tell ’em, Jon.
3. Dead Service
Skull & Bones. Foamstars. Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League. Concord. Ubisoft, Square Enix, Warner Bros and no less than Playstation themselves all released new live service titles backed by tons of marketing this year, and they all hit the ground face first with a thud and a slide. The proximity in which these games released – especially the first three in a jam-packed February – casts each of their individual failures in a harsh, piercing light: their publishers all looked like limp and irresponsible trend-chasers. A special mention must go to Sony, whose warp-speed abandon-ship treatment of Concord and developer Firewalk promises to make a doozy of a page-turner someday.
Now I acknowledge that I’ve been around a couple of decades in the gaming space and my tastes may reflect that, so there may be a bit of schadenfreude here on my part. But if that was all it was, this list entry wouldn’t be here. I have been known to enjoy a good live-service multiplayer game in my time – even a few in 2024 – but the execution just wasn’t there with these four traditional powerhouse console publishers. Each was once known for delivering polished, all-around excellent single-player titles – you might even say Playstation built an empire on that reputation – but perceived market realities and bosses with dollar-signs in their eyes convinced them all to invest serious time, money and talent into producing games ripe for ridicule and/or ambivalence within a saturated market. Well, here we are.
2. Purple Blues
Leave it to Ubisoft. It’s safe to say it has not been a fantastic few years for the once-great French publisher, but mediocrity and foolish zeitgeist-pouncing have become so depressingly normal for Ubi that they haven’t often made this list in recent times; after all, when you don’t expect anything, you can’t be disappointed. And yet the purple team with a long history of elevating old E3 shows, surprising players with cool left-field collaborations and defining open-world videogames for generations truly appeared set to bounce back in 2024.
For once, exciting new single-player adventures looked set to dominate their release catalogue, kicked off by the long-awaited simultaneous return of both Prince of Persia and the Rayman Legends team, ending with the even longer-awaited arrival of the Assassin’s Creed series in Japan, and spiced up by a very expensive-looking Star Wars fantasy without a lightsaber in sight somewhere in the middle. And sure, hype for Skull & Bones was hard to find, but even the company’s new IP crossover shooter XDefiant seems like fun.
S & B aside, the company did start the year by keeping up with this hype, but then the mask slipped and everything came crumbling down in September after the launch of Star Wars: Outlaws. News of truly pitiful sales numbers immediately preceded a 2025 delay announcement for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, followed by the soul-crushing slice-up of the development house behind Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, then the imminent closure of XDefiant – which I did actually enjoy for a session or two – and then the very likely possibility that just a few years after resisting a buyout, Ubisoft was ready to be sold off to a larger corporation. The writing has arguably been on the wall since before the pandemic, but what a spectacular fall from grace nonetheless.
1. The Dissolution of Tango Gameworks
It has been a bit of an all-time year for disappointing videogame news, but ever since this horrendous headline dropped on May 8th, there was never going to be another #1 on my list. This one isn’t squished into a trend, nor is it part of a wider entry on just how poorly Microsoft handled the entire first half of 2024 (although we will get to that somehow). Aside from that Prince of Persia studio story, no entertainment media headline sank my heart quicker than the announcement of Tango Gameworks’ closure.
Hi-Fi Rush wasn’t just my GOTY runner-up last year because it’s an amazing game, but because a game that looks and sounds like Hi-Fi Rush was such an incredibly meaningful flag in the ground for the modern Xbox promise: the idea that with a Game Pass subscription, you get all kinds of experiences from all kinds of developers hailing from all kinds of places. Tango was already Microsoft’s only major in-house Japanese studio, and the fact they had proven themselves with both gruesome horror and deliriously fun Saturday-morning cartoon platformers only served to widen the appeal of their inclusion in the Xbox “family”. Whatever the actual financial realities behind the shuttering, to say Phil and co. fumbled the ball with every aspect of this one from execution to internal and external messaging is a gigantic understatement.
At least the resulting community uproar convinced Korean publisher Krafton to go for the goodwill headline and rescue Tango a few months later, because even if that very publisher has inspired absolutely no confidence with their previous single-player output, this creative team more than deserves another shot. Microsoft’s loss.
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Honorable Mentions
–Pals in the Crossfire
You might think Nintendo’s lawsuit against Palworld worthy of the main list, such is the power of the Goliath-crushing-David allegory and the apparent follow-through on the ‘gameplay patent’ momentum the company started last year. But the timing seemed weirdly late and the settlement expectation weirdly low, until top-tier videgame legal breakdown expert Moon Channel dropped one of the year’s best explainer videos. Yeah, that Sony buyout looks real important now.
It will still suck if Nintendo wins, though.
–That Weird Multiplat Silence
It’s easy to forget given everything that happened to and for the Xbox brand over the rest of the year, but the way the company handled its public messaging throughout February amidst swirling rumours of first-party releases on competing platforms inspired very little confidence in the new direction. They waited so long to address the issue that the most vocal of devoted Xbox fans were allowed to own the online conversation, torching much of Xbox’s minimal hard-won goodwill. And when Microsoft did address things, what we got was a stilted 20-minute podcast without sufficient clarity on the new stance. Evidently there was internal hesitance to shoot straight on this one, but for all intents and purposes that only backfired.
–The Run-off of the Spidey-Verse
Madam Web. Venom 3. Kraven the Hunter. All in one year. 18 months on from all the awards chat about Across the Spider-Verse, the aggressively mediocre flip-side of Sony Pictures’ modern superhero film approach slapped us all in the face repeatedly. Bleh. I couldn’t even muster the ironic curiosity to see any of them, like I did in the good old Morbius days. Hey, I hear the new Venom movie is at least better than the second one, so that’s something.
Vagrant Rant 