Editor's Corner: Pocket Gamer's 2024 in review

• Editor in Chief Dann Sullivan pulls up a pew to discuss the previous year
• It's been a year of extremes, which we tend to say every year
• The highs of this year show that the future isn't as bleak as it might seem

Well, we're now at the end of the (Gregorian) year, so now's as good a time as any to look back over 2024, which happens to have been one of the most eventful years in the gaming industry's history. I've decided that this year's retrospective should go beyond covering the state of the industry to also include the website and what current trends and moves mean for the future of mobile gaming.

• If you're looking for something lighter, like a list of our favourite games throughout the year (as, perhaps, teased by the header), then check out our list of the best mobile games of 2024.

This marks the end of my fifth year running the consumer side of the editorial output at Steel Media (internally we have B2B and B2C divisions, and while I strafe them to a degree, most of my time is spent on our player-focused sites). It's been the strangest year to date.

Back when I started writing about games I did so on a site that myself and a few buddies had launched. It was 2011, and at the time I was still working in retail (GAME, the main video game retailer in the UK). I'd been working there for several years and had always got a kick out of people coming back and sharing their happiness at my recommendations. With the shift to digital (and the joyful spread of indie) as well as more and more independent publishers and media outlets showing up online, my group of pals decided that we'd give it a shot.

• It's impossible to talk about 2024 without talking about industry layoffs, which surpassed 2023 back at the start of the year and continued at full speed throughout. For a glimpse at the numbers and damage, check out pocketgamer.biz's Layoffs Tag.

Well, 12-13 years most of those independent publishers are gone. It's been a slow burn, but more and more outlets have closed and, due to the changes to how advertising and search engines work, that's something that seems to have only accelerated during my time at Steel Media - especially over the past eight/nine months.

I've seen sites that I idolised change hands several times before turning to dust, and there's not much left of the earlier generations of independent media either. That said, there's now a renaissance of smaller, independent, fan-funded media popping up - so there's some hope that tastemaker, recommendation-driven and critical media will persist, it's just that it won't be under the same names as before.

Pocket-Sized Persistence

That said - and this isn't a boast or a gloat - we've held strong during the 'traffic'-tumultuous past three years, grazed by the traffic crashes that have gutted larger publishers. We've done that by pivoting the kind of articles that we write: amping up reviews, launching more regular features and restoring the podcast.

We've also been blessed with a lot of support from a great sales team, technical team and central operations team - as well as benefited from our amazing Pocket Gamer Connects events and all of the access and fringe events they bring.

The site has seen some tweaks too, as many of our regular readers will have noticed. We've had some tweaks made to how and where we write things, which has resulted in tidier URLs and titles as well as the addition of the highlights sections (where I refer to myself in the third person above). Our layout has also changed slightly, making our homepage more of a curated destination. We date back to the magazine days, so why shouldn't we be able to represent that on short notice?

Pocket Gamer, through our parent company, Steel Media, has always thrived due to its ability to pivot toward (and invite discussions on) the next big thing. At times that's been Touchscreen, The AppStores, Subscriptions, Battle Passes, Microtransactions, Webstores, XR as well as slightly more controversial recent topics like NFTs, Blockchain and AI.

AI has always been a core part of how video games innovate (Intelligence is, of course, in the eye of the beholder and 'pathfinding', 'adaptive programming' and 'procedural generation' are all AI, to gaming's original definition). However, as the world's major search provider (as well as some more questionable entities) attempts to replace the human-written word with generated content it's made things trickier for outlets. AI slop (finalist for Oxford University Press's 2024 Word of the Year) is making it tougher and tougher, and that's why so many outlets are moving to deliberately making 'more human' content rather than trying to content against both the slop, and the churn of larger guide sites. We're there with them.

But what of the industry?

It's been a funny few years, to say the least, and 2024 has been a continuation of a lot of the big challenges that shook up mobile developers, publishers and platforms over 2023.

We saw Apple's privacy sandbox completely shake up how advertising worked (as it turns out, people WILL opt out of sharing data when given the choice), which changed how targeted ads work and shook up the hypercasual landscape. 

We also had Epic's war on the Duopoly continue, and it broke ground too, with them triggering the EU's lust for regulation and moderation as well as their (pretty respectful in 2024) dislike of monopolies. However, it's increasingly clear that Epic's war to open up the ecosystem is going to cost them (and their Tencent backers) a lot over time, and is going to be years of gruelling, trench-warfare battles. Apple opening up in the EU is a success, but other regional and national governments aren't as particular as the EU. 

That said, just two weeks back Epic landed a massive goal that only a few outlets covered: Epic struck a deal with Telefónica (o2, Movistar, Vivo). While it's not Epic's clear ultimate goal - the ability to be freely downloaded and used on all mobile devices, without any restrictions or charges - it does skip that step by having it preinstalled on phones. For us here in the UK, existing mergers and looming deals extend o2 (and subsequently Epic's) sphere of influence to Virgin Media, Vodafone and Three - all major players. While a Telefónica deal doesn't instantly prep paper for that preinstall situation to spread further, it certainly opens doors, and I know we'll see more on that in 2025.

What even is a mobile game?

Back when I was still working in the shops and when Pocket Gamer was in its earliest days, a mobile game had to be downloaded through a semi-contrived series of texting and typing in details. Pocket Gamer ran magazines in a bunch of the UK's mobile stores which covered how to download them, and which ones were best to grab.

A few years on we had Apple and Google's own App Stores. The internet was flourishing and phone technology had rocketed forward - we had full web browsers and easy interfacing with our smartphones. Then came the APK stores, and eventually alternative webstores. However, sideloading aside, we also recently started to see streaming and subscriptions on the rise.

In 2025 we'll have titles like Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero and Infinity Nikki out and on the market, all of them having players who freely strafe between mobile and PC. At the same time, games that cut their teeth on mobile - like Clash of Clans and Subway Surfers - are now available on PC through Google Play Games. I played Netease's Badlanders and Lilith's Rise of Kingdoms both on my PC and phone.

Next year we'll see Microsoft's store launch after its delay from July this year, the giant took swipes at Apple's 30% charge back in September, not long before launching their 'This is an Xbox' campaign, which posited that everything from phone to PC (anything with a browser) will be able to access the Xbox ecosystem.

This happened while Nintendo kept playing with mobile, Sega doubled down into the space (they bought Rovio) and most major publishers keep expanding into the space. That and, let's not forget, Microsoft now have not only Activision & Blizzard, but King.

A lot of this isn't new, of course. We've been talking about big names getting into mobile for years, but people haven't really put their finger on the why. It's not just because mobile is often the battleground for new mechanics and monetisation techniques, but it's because you can scale mobile up to console, to PC and beyond... scaling PC or console down though... that's harder.

So, now that everything (Discord, Netflix, Telegram, The New York Times... even LinkedIn) is a platform, and - through Microsoft and friends - is back, and Instant Games are on the rise, and subscriptions are more relevant than ever. Mobile gaming is going to change, but it's going to be those inside the ecosystem that are going to be leading it, using these other technologies.

Once more (i)nto the Breach

If you look at popular 2018 turn-based strategy (and a personal favourite of our COO) Into the Breach you can see the single-screen singularity that we're entering into. You can play it on Switch, you can play it on iOS and Android and you can play it on Xbox, Playstation and PC too. This is facilitated by self-publishing and a string of partnerships, but critically, through casting from your phone, you can play it on everything from your phone to a cinema (or, probably bigger if you have a nice projector). You can, of course, run it natively through one of the other devices.

As that little device in your hand gets smarter and more powerful, it's likely to wedge out most other, slower-moving gaming mediums like consoles - although I don't think 2025 is going to be the year for that. I do think that something that we'll be watching closely here at Pocket Gamer is how the Steam Deck encourages 'high tech, big budget' publishers to adopt a generational 'minimum' spec similar to console generations, and what that'll mean for wider adoption of 'mobile' teams and philosophies for 'mainstream' development.

Anyway, 2024 is coming to a close and we've had a bumpy year, but the future is looking bright and exciting. Maybe we never left the creative 'wild west' in this industry, and it's time to fully embrace that again, especially here in the wild world of mobile.