The biggest disappointments of 2024

After 12 months of blockbusters like Helldivers 2, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Earthtree, Dune: Part 2 and Shogun, it’s not unreasonable to consider 2024 a good year for pop culture. But the smooth always comes with the rough, and the past year has been truly amazing for the things we love and the people who make them.

From layoffs and studio closures to expensive consoles, terrible adaptations and struggling sequels, these are the biggest disappointments of 2024.

Game industry layoffs and closures

The games industry faced a crisis in 2023, with many publishers and studios, both large and small, laying off many workers in an effort to cut costs. But the pains of that year would be repeated in 2024, he saw The loss of 14,600 jobs has been calculated – 39% increase between years. The cuts have thrown thousands of talented studio employees into the toughest job market the games industry has ever seen, with developers scrambling to find new roles in a landscape where companies are thinning.

They have been among the top companies cutting back on workers the rebellion, Microsoft, Bungie, the union, TakeTwo Interactive, EAand PlayStation. Such businesses have reduced their workforce due to various reasons and factors, including rising development costs, changing player habits in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, and the global impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Whatever the reasons, the remaining employees at these publishers and studios must continue to work in uncertain times without the support of their former colleagues.

That is if their studio still exists. Several studios have been closed to the sad image. The most prominent of these is perhaps Arkane Austin, Bethesda’s immersive simulation specialist, responsible for the famous Capture. Unfortunately his last release, Redfall, was a critical and commercial bomb, a situation that seemingly sealed his fate. Arkane Austin was shut down by parent company Microsoft, along with Alpha Dog Games, Roundhouse Games and Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks.. Somewhat miraculously, Tango was rescued by Krafton in a last-minute twist of fate, but such good news is rare. This year they also suffered from closure PlayStation’s London studioGalvanic Games, Avalanche Studio Group’s New York and Montreal studiosas well as others. To say it’s been a tough year is an understatement.

Trend finding failures

This is another developer that has been closed for good Firewalk StudiosThe team behind the biggest disaster of the PlayStation generation: concord. A PvP hero shooter, its long and expensive development meant that the genre was long overdue for its popularity. But, despite being developed by many FPS veterans like Bungie and Activision, it could have been the PlayStation’s next big multiplayer phenomenon it struggled to stand out among the likes of Overwatch and Apex Legends thanks to its poor character kit and standard fare target design. From the outside the Concord looked like just another typical hero shooter, which meant few wanted to see what was going on inside.

It’s no exaggeration to say that almost no one showed up for the firing in August, he got it It only has 697 concurrent players on Steam in its first week. Less than two weeks later, Sony withdrew Concord from salereturned to the players and closed the game. At the end of October, Firewalk Studios was closed for business. All this means that Concord is gone without a trace. Well, almost- An episode of Amazon’s Secret Level serves as an animated series a background to the story at play in Concord that never happened.

A similar, thankfully less tragic story happened earlier this year with Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. After months of poorly received marketing, Suicide Squad launched critical and commercial bomb. As with Concord, much of Kill The Justice League’s flaws were chasing trends that players had long since tired of; in this case, Destiny-style live action shooter grind. It didn’t help that Suicide Squad resembled Crystal Dynamics’ ill-fated Avengers game a few years back, which similarly annoyed players for being a repetitive multiplayer PvE game. In the case of Suicide Squad, it was a massive fall from grace for a studio that previously made beloved single-player Batman games. Many of us wanted more from the best-in-class superhero action with a villainous twist, but unfortunately Warner Bros.’s live-action revenue seemed to get in the way. No results – due to lack of initial sales and low player count a significant drop in income for the company

Hardware Hiccups

The time compression effect of the pandemic years has disguised the fact that, yes, we are in the middle of the current console generation. Immediately, Sony delivered the PlayStation 5 Pro’s mid-cycle refresh, and it’s almost safe to say. no one was happy with its $700 price tag. That’s not just because of the cost of living straining everyone’s wallets – Introduction by Mark Cerny apparently it showed the console’s ability to render The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered much better than the base console, basically the “They’re the same picture” meme from The Office.

While it’s time to prove that the PS5 Pro costs $200 more than the regular PS5, early results have been pretty disappointing. Instead of removing the need to decide between quality and performance modes, developers have added more options to Pro-patched games with confusing names like ‘Fidelity Pro’ and ‘Variability’. Remember when you plugged in a console and it worked? halcyon days Also, all the extra power of the Pro can’t do either make Bloodborne look better.

At least Sony fans got a console, though. After months of rumors that it would announce a successor to the Nintendo Switch, the company announced a new piece of hardware: an alarm clock. Yes, it’s Alarm A $100 watch with gaming-themed alarms and a motion sensor that can detect when you get out of bed. It’s hardly the Switch 2 we expected. And even then A history of rare Nintendo hardwareIt’s far from the most interesting or strange alarm. A real disappointment from Mario’s house.

Unreliable Unreliable

In the realm of television, things have been bright thanks in large part to the likes of Arcane, Shogun, and Fallout. But 2024 saw even some traditionally reliable shows struggle to maintain their quality. Season 3 of The Bear certainly wasn’t bad – once again delivered strong character drama and beautiful kitchen nightmares. But, compared to the incredible heights of the first two seasons, this third chapter falls significantly short. Its frustratingly slow pace clashed with the lightning speed of previous years, and the focus almost entirely on Carmy’s inner crisis forced valuable characters like Sydney to the sidelines.

We have also seen this year’s Star Wars project fighting for the heights of The Mandalorian and Andor. the acolyte was built on a fascinating premise that delved into the galaxy’s past, exploring the end of the High Republic. It was full of Jedi and had some of the most beautiful lightsaber battles in the entire franchise, but even that couldn’t save the series from its sloppy, irritating storytelling.

The Acolyte’s saving grace may have been Manny Jacinto’s Sith Lord Stranger, who wears one of the most menacing helmets in all of Star Wars. But while a deeper exploration of his character could have made the second season much better, we will never see that thanks to Disney completely axing the show. This isn’t just a Disney problem; Netflix has continued its habit of canceling shows after barely giving them a chance to realize their full potential. Including the 2024 Netflix murder Chaos and Dead Boy Detectives, who join last year’s Lockwood & Co in the “discontinued after one season” club.

Awesome adaptations

This year’s Fallout was a great exercise in how to adapt a video game for TV, with Amazon’s show Wasteland among our 2024 TV highlights. But it seems that Fallout’s success isn’t a guaranteed indicator that every Amazon video game show will be fantastic. , as evidenced by the horrors Like a Dragon: The Yakuza Show it came into service a few months later. With no karaoke, too little Majima, and too much melodrama, Like a Dragon completely missed the stark contrast between serious and silly that Yakuza games thrive on.

It’s not just Japanese RPGs that have been mistreated for TV this year. The famous Japanese manga Uzumaki also received its long-awaited animated adaptation, and the results couldn’t go any worse. The four-part Adult Swim show turned Junji Ito’s monochrome horror into a rushed mess in the sprint to the finale, undermining plot points, character arcs and scares along the way. The biggest disappointment, however, was the huge drop in animation quality a visually rich episode. Uzumaki went from beautifully chilled to a low-budget nightmare in the span of a week: a carpetbagger scarier than anything Junji Ito could write.

Box Office Bombs

Unfortunately, the awesome adaptations weren’t limited to the small screen. It was one of the biggest box office bombs of the year border crossings. Gearbox’s awesome loot shooter Guardians of the Galaxy was turned into a horribly misguided rip-off for its own live-action big-screen adventure. Many of the game’s most recognizable features, such as its sense of humor and love of turning humans into piles of goopy gore, were reduced to nothing. The result was bland, recycled MCU ideas aimed at mass marketing. In short: a total disaster. It is not surprising died an unceremonious death when it opened in theaters, Lionsgate CEO said “Almost everything that could go wrong went wrong.”

It’s safe to say that an FPS like Borderlands wouldn’t have survived the transition to film. The follow-up to the highest-grossing comic book movie of all time and the first film to cross $1 billion at the box office, though? Surely a second Joker would be an easy win. Not so much. Joker: Folie à Deux was a sad follow-upDirector Todd Phillips pretty much undid everything he set up in the first film. When even Lady Gaga can’t keep some of your music out of steamy courtroom drama scenes, you know you’re in trouble.

For moviegoers of the classic mold, however, Megalopolis is almost certainly the biggest disappointment of the year. Director Francis Ford Coppola’s years-long, self-financed magnum opus (perhaps, if we’re being honest, somewhat predictable) The Godfather was an enjoyable disaster. Some have seen method in the madness (including our reviewer, who Gave it a 9/10) but to many this lush fable set in a futuristic Rome-like New York City was a bloated, pretentious, boring mess. How the creator of the movie Mafia got here may be one of the greatest mysteries in the universe.

From studio closures to box office disasters, 2024 has had some real low points. It’s hard to find a silver lining in some of them, and we continue to hope that the industries that make the things we love will do better in 2025. But in other cases, it’s the downs that make the ups shine, and you can. find many of these shining stars in our list of the best reviewed games of 2025.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.