If you believed the online speculation roar, it was supposed to be the year of the next Nintendo console, with strong whispers of an upgraded PS5 machine swirling amidst potentially exciting new hardware developments from Microsoft as per those juicy 2023 leaks. While things didn’t quite turn out according to the hype sheet, 2024 was still a fascinating year to write this list. Well, for the current-gen consoles anyway. Get ready for a wildly unbalanced personal ranking based on which console’s 2024 presence negotiated its year of terrible PR with the fewest stumbles. Uh, yay?
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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. Xbox One
LAST YEAR: 4th
The top three are pretty wordy this year, so I’ll give the aged-out Xbone about as much attention as Microsoft did this year: it was a fun, often unpredictable console to cover over the years, it got a few new games in 2024, but this may actually be the last time I count it on this top five list.
4. Playstation 4
LAST YEAR: 5th
The biggest 2024 event for the PS4 may just have been the sensational May news story from Sony that revealed fully 50% of Playstation gamers still play on the PS4, despite the fact that virtually all PS exclusives have abandoned the machine by now. The pandemic and its chip shortages may have indirectly assisted the eleven-year-old Playstation 4 by turning the successful purchase of its successor into a pricey flex for a couple of years, but thanks to the low graphical requirements of the world’s most played games and the ever-shrinking size of generational tech leaps, the widely-loved slanted box just keeps on trucking. It may have been a quiet one by this list’s criteria, but I say well played.
3. Xbox Series X|S
LAST YEAR: 3rd
2024 was a year Xbox was arguably set to dominate from the beginning, with that “one exclusive per quarter” promise set to at last bear fruit after years of pandemic-interrupted studio acquisitions and flashy executive-centred presentations. Instead, it was the worst year for Xbox PR in over a decade.
No, it wasn’t quite as bad as 2013, when Don Mattrick and friends destroyed a decade of hard-won goodwill by casually gesturing towards a glossy black box that may as well have been on fire. No, it wasn’t a complete trainwreck; we can’t ignore that show-stopping June presentation filled with sky-high promise calling to mind the glory days of E3, not to mention the strong critical reception of 2024’s most prominent day-one game pass drops (buggy Flight Sim launch aside). But my word, what a colossal mess otherwise!
We’ve already covered that awful messaging debacle regarding Xbox’s approach to console exclusivity going forward, as well as the even more disastrous closure of Tango Gameworks (alongside Arkane Austin and a couple more studios, while we’re on the topic). But 2024 also trickled out a couple of underwhelming console revisions to fill out the no-man’s land pricing area between the launch Xbox Series S and X SKUs, then took some further sheen off of the Game Pass service by hiking the price up once again while continuing to miss the big-name new indie titles which are usually so handy to fill out the months between major releases.
While that price jump was justified by the massive day-one inclusion of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, the best-reviewed game in the series for a very long time, the rest of the cavalry arrived pretty late: S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle showed up so close together at year’s end they pushed Avowed into 2025 almost by necessity (and so hot they were each missing features at launch). Meanwhile the only Game Pass title of consequence to distract from all the early-year negativity was Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II – a grand spectacle, but not exactly a wide-ranging crowd-pleaser.
2. Nintendo Switch
LAST YEAR: 1st
For several years now it’s been almost pointless to compare the quantity of exclusive releases between the Nintendo Switch and its nominal competitors, even though I kind of do it anyway; Nintendo has made such an art of spacing out exclusives of variable budgets at a pace far outstripping Xbox and Playstation that I’ve had to move the goalposts in recent times just to make this a worthwhile discussion. Ranking the Switch’s year is now more about comparing against itself the prior year, then contrasting my resulting feelings against the strides made by the other lads. And by that weird metric, second place in 2024 checks out.
It started with the modest-yet-underrated reimagining of Another Code: Recollection and ended with the even lower-key Fitness Boxing 3. In between the Switch got its first brand-new entry in the Mario & Luigi RPG series for almost a decade, the first brand-new top-down Zelda game for over a decade, the first videogame starring Princess Peach in the lead role for almost two decades, the first acknowledgement of the fan-favourite classic Paper Mario formula for two decades, the first brand-new retro arcade-style game in the Super Monkey Ball series for over two decades, and the first brand-new entry in the Famicom Detective Club series for three decades.
Yep, there was a real “test the waters with a bunch of niche franchises and unexpected revivals to satiate hardcore fans in the Switch’s last year” vibe to 2024. So of course, I was loving every second of it. But that wasn’t all; we also got a few reminders of Nintendo’s unparalleled commitment to local multiplayer with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, Super Mario Party Jamboree, and even the unexpectedly meaty Mario vs Donkey Kong remake – which was originally just a single-player game. We also saw Nintendo put their own addictive spin on a roguelite with Splatoon 3: Side Order. And I simply can’t avoid mentioning the grand return of my beloved Banjo-Tooie to a Nintendo platform, which you can read all about on this very site.
The releases were also spread out impeccably, hitting that virtual one-game-per-month cadence Nintendo has become increasingly good at over the last few years and giving each title ample room to breathe. Yet the absence of 2023’s big hitters was still keenly felt as the shadow of the ever-unconfirmed next Nintendo console loomed larger and larger over the ailing Switch. This was especially true in the latter stages of the year, as even first-party new releases began to struggle visibly, perhaps even suspiciously, with technical performance. Almost as if their developers expected a more powerful, backwards-compatible console to be on store shelves by then…
1. Playstation 5
LAST YEAR: 2nd
For all their recent stumbles, Playstation did make sure to get a message out early in the year to manage fan expectations, indicating in no uncertain terms that they would not have any major first-party exclusives ready to release across the entirety of 2024. But if such a forecast seemed like a grim indictment on the current state of the triple-A game industry in general – and Sony’s recent slate of well-documented project cancellations in particular – a stunningly well-timed line-up of publishing deals made years ago all happened to bear fruit right around the same time to ensure the PS5 was lit up with quality exclusive after quality exclusive for the whole first third of 2024.
There’s no other way to say it: the cadence of this streak was positively Nintendo-esque. Stellar Blade, Granblue Fantasy Relink and Rise of the Ronin each came from lengthy development cycles plagued by delays, but represented refreshing perspectives that brought unique hooks to tried-and-true action game formulas. The grandiose arrival of Tekken 8 kinda spoke for itself, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth managed to set the Square RPG bar higher than it has been in decades, and as for Helldivers 2, well, it was a phenomenon from opening weekend. Well, for a few months at least – although the game’s substantial ongoing support is already something to behold.
Then something curious happened. Right around early May, at the end of this magnificent run, the Playstation Plus Extra program began to acquire some substantial day one indie game wins. Animal Well and Tales of Kenzera: ZAU arrived conspicuously on the Plus service despite an absence from Xbox Game Pass, a truly rare occurrence that became slightly less rare when it repeated itself come September courtesy of The Plucky Squire. And while September also saw the decidedly non-Xbox move of Horizon Forbidden West’s surprising removal from the service, the month also gave us Astro Bot, the glorious award-winning culmination of decades of developer frustration at the lack of quality new family-friendly platformers on non-Nintendo platforms.
On the hardware front, Sony started by releasing the divisive Playstation Portal down here in Australia – which I wrote extensively about back in March – and finished with the even more divisive PS5 Pro. The latter may be eye-wateringly expensive, but it does at least do its job for the most part – even if that job is rather dull to talk about: games do look and run a bit better on the platform. Yes, Concord was a massive, embarrassing and ultimately predictable failure; the kind on a scale so large that it might just cause a corporation to rethink its entire content strategy. But the last word must go to Black Myth Wukong, which started the year as a multiplatform release by a small developer with no cash but ended as a Playstation console exclusive phenomenon available on a physical disc. If that doesn’t perfectly sum up the inner identity battle at Sony, I don’t know what does. Either way, the 30th anniversary of the blue team could have gone a lot worse.
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Honorable Mentions
Yep, we’re still waiting.
Vagrant Rant 