What will be the biggest gaming trends of 2024?

In case you were wondering whether 2024 will continue game studios’ favorite trend—marketing old, successful games they know will move units once they’ve been treated with a glossy coat of paint for new consoles/markets—then look no further than January 19th, when The Last Of Us Part II Remastered inexplicably makes its way to stores as the year’s first big release. Even for Sony, a company that never met a Remastered it didn’t like, this one is pretty egregious: The Last Of Us Part II is all of three years old at this point, still runs great on modern hardware, and looks good to boot. It’s hard to imagine a really good reason to re-release the game—except to get a bit more blood from a very lucrative stone.

Not all Remastereds are created equal, of course; 2024 will also see the release of Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, which will at least repackage games that have gotten a bit harder for players to get their hands on over the decades, sending players through the first three of Lara Croft’s very blocky adventures. The early Tomb Raider games are odd enough that it’s much harder to fault publishers for going back to the much-less-traveled well to bring them back as an act of interest and curation—a decent reminder that there’s nothing inherently wrong with re-releasing old games for modern audiences. (Bandai Namco is doing a revamped version of cult gaming classics Retro Game Challenge for the Switch that we’re dying to have get an American release.) As long as, y’know, you’re not “remastering” a game that’s still sitting on Gamestop shelves this very second.

Speaking of the world of physical media in games, things aren’t looking especially rosy for it: Although no major new consoles are currently slated for the year, Microsoft is reportedly getting ready to release a new disc-free version of its Xbox Series X hardware. (Sony already eschewed disc-based fans with a no-disc-drive version of the PlayStation 5.) Code-named “Brooklin,” and, per The Verge, accidentally revealed as part of legal documents released as part of Microsoft’s legal battles with the FTC, the new machine will do pretty much everything the Xbox Series X already does—except play game discs.

And while Brooklin will reportedly feature an extra-large hard drive to accommodate its download-only games, it’s still a blow for collectors—or anyone who just doesn’t want to have their access to gaming media operate entirely at the mercy of online storefronts. Nintendo’s still holding out with physical cartridges for the Switch, but Microsoft’s decision to go download-only is just the latest sign that physical media will be getting rarer by the year.

God bless the weirdo sequels: Those games that look at a successful predecessor and ask not “How do we imitate this?” but “How do we screw with it?” 2024 is set to have, as one of its biggest titles, a sequel to one of the kings of weird-sequel-ness, in fact, as Square Enix gears up on February 29th for the release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the follow-up to 2020's deceptively titled Final Fantasy VII Remake. Although it took a while to reveal it, FFVII Remake eventually let slip that it was one of the weirdest meta concepts ever released by a big-budget gaming studio; seeing how this same team continues to work through the story of the original game while also playing with its immediate predecessors’ twists is going to be fascinating to see.

And that’s not the only oddball sequel on the roster. Capcom is set to release Dragon’s Dogma 2, the long-delayed follow-up to one of the only Dark Souls-esque games that’s seriously tried to out-odd the Dark Souls games. We can’t wait to see how the new game builds on the original’s legacy of strange, climbable bosses and eminently throwable children. Or take Like A Dragon: Inifinite Wealth, the immediate follow-up to 2020's Yakuza: Like A Dragon. Like its predecessor, the new game will trade the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series’ traditional brawling gameplay for turn-based combat based on the Dragon Quest games; unlike that earlier title, it will also feature original series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, who remains such an overwhelming badass that he can briefly drag the gameplay back to real-time ass-kicking as one of his special powers. Delightful!

Even with controllers down, there’s no reason to think gaming’s recent footholds in the world of both TV and film are going anywhere. Sonic The Hedgehog 3 will race into theaters around Christmas-time—along with god knows how much build-up attached to the question of who’ll be voicing Sonic’s gun-loving frenemy Shadow—while Eli Roth’s long-delayed Borderlands movie is supposedly coming out in August. (Believe it when we see it on that one; Roth’s adaptation has been kicking around since back when people still gave a crap about Borderlands games.) A lot of people are gunning for those Mario Bros. Movie billions at this point, and the competition’s only getting hotter.

TV might be even more exciting, though, and not just because of that Knuckles show on Paramount+. The big acid test is going to be Amazon’s Fallout show, adapting one of gaming’s most beloved franchises. The series, starring Ella Purnell, Kyle Maclachlan, and Walton Goggins, doesn’t look quite as grim and serious as HBO’s The Last Of Us, but it’ll still force the question of whether audiences are really ready for more thoughtful fare in their video game TV adaptations.

Criticize it, as so many did, but never deny it: The Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3) was once the biggest name in gaming conventions. Focus on was: The convention was officially pronounced dead this week, after years of being on its very last legs, a victim of COVID-19 in the short term, but wider market pressures in the aggregate. It’s not for nothing that the news of E3's death came just a few days after Geoff Keighley’s annual (and much-critiqued) The Game Awards; The TGAs were one of several entities that have spent the last few years nimbly out-maneuvering the old dinosaur, working in tandem with Keighley’s own Summer Games Fest to co-opt E3's position as the pulpit of gaming hype.

In truth, though, E3 probably didn’t need that much help dying, given how poorly its structure adapted to the internet. Its goose was probably cooked the minute Nintendo realized it no longer needed it; the Japanese legends have spent more than a decade at this point using the internet to hold their own personalized online gaming conferences, the Nintendo Direct series, without any need to acquire theater or booth space or make the trip out to California. We expect to continue to see big gaming companies continue to leverage their influence directly like this, working directly with fans; meanwhile, a smaller, more fleet series of gaming conferences—both virtual and physical—have cropped up in the gaps, allowing players to learn about, demo, and play games that would have drowned in E3's corporate shuffle.

2023 was a year of major labor movement in gaming studios, with Sega Of America, Bethesda parent company Zenimax, Cyberpunk studio CD Projekt Red, and many more all seeing at least parts of their workforces unionize. Given the often massive instability that afflicts even “successful” game studios—which can shutter after even a single under-performing game—as well as persistent issues with overwork and sexual harassment in the industry, it’ll be interesting to see how the “unionize game studios” movement continues to build on its momentum in 2024.

Meanwhile, the industry might soon be facing labor action from outside its walls, too: Fresh off this summer’s film and television strikes, actors union SAG-AFTRA has gone to its members for a strike authorization against several major game studios. Said authorization having been granted back in September, it’s likely to be a potent tool as the union negotiates with major studios in the coming months.

You can, of course, make video games without actors, a lot more easily than you can TV or movies. (People were doing it for 40 years before the first actors started working in the medium.) But as games get more cinematic, and strive for greater verisimilitude, they’ve become far more likely to tap acting talent as a selling point, and labor issues with actors’ likenesses are only going to get thornier as technology advances.