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 I don’t even bother half the time. It also simply… does not support PlayStation controllers natively? Doesn’t Sony have a stake in your company?
I digress. It’s a launcher I would genuinely love to use—as great as Steam is, it wouldn’t hurt for it to have some real competition. Robin Valentine said as much when he reviewed a bunch of PC gaming launchers for 2024. If Epic can put skibidi toilet in Fortnite, they can use some of that money to give their platform an overhaul, win over some of its naysayers and give Steam a run for its money.
Listen, you asked for a bold prediction. —Mollie Taylor, Features Producer
A big-budget Phasmophobia or Lethal Company will finally appear
Blockbuster games take 5-8 years and often hundreds of millions of dollars to make. In nautical terms, the biggest publishers—Ubisoft, EA, Xbox, Take Two—are giant freighters that are slow to change their steer in the face of ever-shifting video game trends.
5 years post-Phasmophobia (which is still quite good) should have been long enough for one of these giants to seize on this still-developing genre that combines co-op, proximity chat, and sandbox horror. The success of Lethal Company and Content Warning would’ve been too big to ignore, but even bigger than that is the fact that everyone is playing games through the filter of their Discord friends, and looking for experiences that are compatible with hanging out in a voice call. As charming as the independently-produced versions of these games are, bigger budgets could bring deeper systems, higher visual fidelity, and generally more stuff to populate those scary sandboxes. There is one candidate for this prediction already in play: Midnight Murder Club, developed by the creators of Knockout City and published by Sony. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director
Civilization 7 is the one that breaks the “Civ cycle”
The Civilization games are pretty much always good. Heck, they’re pretty much always great. Civilization 4 set an incredibly high bar back in 2005, then raised it further with several major expansions. By the time Civ 5 arrived in 2010, it was certainly well-received, but I remember plenty of people confidently saying Civ 4 was the one to play for a few years longer. By the time Civ 5 got its expansions, it won over the holdouts… and then Civ 6 came out.
This is where I’d say the Civ cycle really imprinted itself: the last game, bulked up with years of updates and comfortingly familiar, keeps the new one from becoming the de facto Civ for the first couple years of its life. As PC Gamer contributor Len Hafer wrote in 2018: “It’s hard to make a new strategy game that can compete with Civilization—even when that new strategy game is also Civilization.”
The anticipation around Civilization 7 (like winning the #1 Most Wanted PC game of 2025) tells me this one’s going to break the cycle, though. Maybe it won’t immediately eclipse Civ 6 in raw player numbers—that would take millions of sales out of the gate. But I think people are ready for a new one this time. It’s been a while! From Civ 1 in 1991 to Civ 6 in 2016, Firaxis never went more than six years between games. It’s now been more than eight years since Civ 6. The latest Civ had far more (and more frequent) updates than any game before it, but for once I think that’s actually going to give the next Civ a leg up. Where the heck do you start with two expansions and 18 separate bits of DLC trying to get into Civ 6 today? I’m ready for Civilization 7 to wipe the slate clean. Send me back to the stone age. —Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor
Valve will announce a new Half-Life game, or it won’t but we’ll find out about it anyway
It’s a PC gaming tradition for someone to incorrectly claim that Half-Life 3 is imminent once every six months or so, as last seen in the unfounded rumors that it was going to show up at The Game Awards. So, to be clear, I am not coyly alluding to any secret evidence I have that a Half-Life game is in the works. I just think there probably is one.
It’s been five years since Half-Life: Alyx released, and I doubt Deadlock is the only new game Valve has been working on since then. A recent tease by G-man’s voice actor and all the fireworks launched for Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary last year add a little more credibility to this speculation.
I only hesitate to say that the next Half-Life game will be announced this year because of how uptight Valve is about the series. In the Half-Life 2 anniversary documentary, Gabe Newell made it clear that Episode 3 didn’t get made because he couldn’t figure out how it was “pushing anything forward,” and after releasing a great VR game, I’m unsure whether Valve has decided what it wants to push forward next.
If Valve is still searching for the next Half-Life worthy technical achievement, it may be a longer wait than I’m anticipating here. Still, if it hasn’t already been revealed in some datamined Counter-Strike 2 update, I do think we could see real evidence of Valve’s search for that premise this year. —Tyler Wilde, US Editor-in-Chief
Ubisoft gets back on track
Kinda sad that this is a “bold” prediction, but I think Ubisoft can still turn things around after a pretty bad run of years. All signs indicate that the publisher’s fate will be informed by how well its only major game with a release date, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, performs. The action RPG got delayed to February, but I find that encouraging considering the company’s made a habit of rushing unstable games out the door. The good news is Shadows is only looking better the more I see of it. I’m seeing the signs of a Ubi that remembers it used to make very good stealth games.
Speaking of, that Splinter Cell remake still has no release window. If the path forward is taking smaller bets on smaller games, a linear stealth game with a legacy (now old enough that a younger generation will be meeting Sam Fisher for the first time) is a decent place to start. Elsewhere, Rainbow Six Siege remains a steady vessel of quality tac-shooting. The FPS will begin its 10th year of updates. Meanwhile, XDefiant will shut down in June having just turned one. —Morgan Park, Staff Writer
I am as ready as anyone for The Sims series to have some legitimate competition. EA has reigned uncontested for too long. But if we think that Inzoi is going to swan in with a perfect launch, we’re kidding ourselves. Simulation games are buggy by nature. They’re so complex that there’s basically no way to avoid it. So Inzoi is going to launch with bugs: wonky animations, Zois getting stuck or confused, lighting glitches, crashes to desktop, you name it.
I’m emotionally prepared, but I think a lot of people who’ve been hotly anticipating Inzoi’s ascendance are not going to be in touch with reality on day one. When clips of those egregious bugs start flying around social media we’re going to bear witness to the kind of war Tumblr hasn’t seen in years. Sims loyalists who’ve rejected Inzoi on principle will smugly celebrate the chaos while Inzoi defenders lash out and shut down critiques. There’s going to be passive-aggressive finger wagging for weeks while Krafton scrambles to release hotfixes, I guarantee it. — Lauren Morton, Associate Editor
Rocksteady announces a new Batman Arkham game, finally
Huh, it’s been almost 10 years since Batman: Arkham Knight? And Rocksteady’s last game, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League “failed to meet the company’s expectations financially?” And people are so desperate for new Batman stuff they’ve been making Batman stuff even though they can’t put Batman in that stuff, like a TV show about the Penguin and a TV show about, somehow, the origins of Batman’s friggin’ butler? Yeah, I think Rocksteady is going to shift to Whoops, All Batmans if it hasn’t already, so expect Batman: Arkham Something to be announced around not-E3 time, if not sooner. —Christopher Livingston, Senior Editor
Bethesda finally unveils its long-rumored Oblivion remaster but it has to go toe-to-toe with Skyblivion
There have been rumors of an official, Bethesda-developed remaster of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion swirling around for years now—it was apparently even slated to release all the way back in 2022. The rumor mill is once again churning about this longtime vaporware, and I think this might be the year.
It’d make a lot of sense: The Elder Scrolls 6 is still a long way off, Starfield was a bit of a dud, and Bethesda has both the incentive and room in its release schedule to try and spruce up an old favorite and get us excited about its games again. Skyrim has already been re-released a billion times, Morrowind would require a far more extensive overhaul of its basic systems (and quest design, if you ask me), so Oblivion is in a real sweet spot to benefit from a remaster but not be an insane lift development-wise. In addition to a fresh coat of paint, bringing Oblivion’s combat, loot, and leveling more in line with Skyrim or Fallout 4 would turbocharge what I already find to be such a dreamy, immersive open world. The fact that this remaster has allegedly been cooking for so long leads me to believe it’s much more than a Skyrim Anniversary-style upgrade.
Just one problem: There’s already an Oblivion remaster on the way, we’ve seen it in action, and it looks phenomenal. The Skyblivion total conversion for Skyrim looks like a professional-quality remake, and it’s set to release in 2025. The way I see it, Skyblivion has a big advantage from being a known quantity with a ton of community goodwill, while an official Oblivion remaster would be Bethesda trying to win back the crowd after some more fallow years. On the flip side, Bethesda has the kind of resources the Skyblivion team can only dream of, and if the studio treats the project as a laboratory for the things it wants to achieve in The Elder Scrolls 6, that would make it all the more exciting. I’m eager to see this play out one way or another. —Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor
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