What Have Been the Key Gaming Trends of 2023 So Far?

We’re taking a look at some of the industry’s most compelling gaming trends to see if we can predict where games are going next.

Cosy games explode

While the AAA industry focuses on trying to render every realistic hair on Aloy’s head, the rest of the industry is offering the Disney equivalent of gaming to their Oscar-bait titles: character studies and vast adventures depicted in beautiful but unrealistic animation graphics. Games that allow you to truly choose your path, whether you want to fight orcs or tend to a farm are growing. There’s FaeFarm for example, coming to Nintendo Switch late this year, and of course, staples like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley are all getting upgrades while the games stores and online platforms fill with bright, beautiful, but ultimately calm cosy games. And they’re not limited to the consoles. You can find games for HTML5 like these here.

Good movie tie-ins

We use the word “good” here to varying degrees of seriousness. Of course, whether a game is good or not is a subjective idea, and no game is “good” on release anymore, but for the most part, a lot of movie tie-in games have gotten great reviews. Remember when that was a diamond in a rough kind of situation? We look back at The Simpson’s Hit and Run, for example, knowing full well the greatest part about it is that no one expected it to be great.

But 2023 might be the year to change all that, with titles like Hogwarts: Legacy, Star Wars: Jedi Survival and Aliens: Dark Descent hitting the stores in 2023, all to generally positive reviews. There is the usual grumble that these games need “a little polishing” but what game doesn’t? For the most part, they have grabbed the initial feeling of their franchises and offered up an environment that allows the player to experience it for themselves.

“That’s all we’ve ever asked for”, you hear millennials around the world scream.

Demand for co-ops strengthen

The industry is still under the impression that MMOs are the way to make the most money. The success of battle royale games like Fortnite had every developer in the industry scrambling to incorporate MMO elements into games that had no business involving it, leading to some epic flops, like Fallout 76. It might be playable nowadays, but it still pushes aside the original point of the Fallout franchise: the narrative choices and RPG element. Games like The Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies and entire lists prove our point.

So, what does the player want? To play alone forever? No. Gamers make lifelong friends on the digital battlefield, but we’ve also got friends at home we’d like to play with and that was proven by the 2021 release, It Takes Two. Since then, voices expressing the need for more co-op games have only gone up. There was a time when Mario Kart was the most fun you could have, but we all need to grow up a little. The industry should grow with us and offer more co-op adventures for those nights where you order pizza and a soda bottle the size of a cannon for a great night in.