Roblox, James Bond and a billion-dollar multiplayer – listed below are our most-read gaming tales of 2025 | Games

With the perfect video games of the yr duly famous (yours and ours), I’d like to spotlight a number of the work we’ve performed protecting them. Reviewing the top-performing articles that we printed in 2025, I see a portrait of a conflicted yr: loads of nice works and video games that captured the creativeness and the world’s consideration, but additionally rising anxiousness about their place in the true world, and the political circumstances they mirror. And a number of (justified) hand-wringing over Roblox.

But first: I wished to increase heartfelt because of everybody who reads this text and the remainder of our work on the Guardian. If you’ve loved our protection, do think about supporting us to do extra of it – both via a recurring or one-off contribution. Without your help, not one of the nice journalism we produce could be potential. Thank you for being with us in 2025, and I hope you stick round to observe me slowly lose my thoughts working extra time within the buildup to Grand Theft Auto 6’s launch in November 2026. (Finally).

In no explicit order, listed below are essentially the most learn characteristic articles of the yr.

The Guardian coated Roblox loads in 2025, principally from the attitude of kid security. As Sarah Martin found on this article, this can be very simple to get into inappropriate conditions and chats on this free-for-all of a sport platform, which has greater than 150m day by day customers (most of them youngsters). I’m no fan of Roblox and don’t let my very own children play it, but when your little ones get pleasure out of it and also you don’t wish to prohibit the sport totally I like to recommend ensuring it’s supervised the place potential and people parental controls are locked down.

For some cause this story of my self-flagellating travails with Baby Steps appeared to talk to lots of people. I felt considerably vindicated for spending greater than 12 hours of my life marching a ineffective particular person up a hill.

Our video games correspondent Keith Stuart, goes down certainly one of his favorite rabbit holes right here, rising with a splendidly researched tribute to certainly one of Sega’s lesser-appreciated consoles. Revisionist historical past usually crowns the NES because the winner of the 80s console wars, however that was solely true in Japan and the US – in Europe, house computer systems and the Sega Master System reigned.

I have to admit that this was extraordinarily satisfying to write down. After boasting about his gaming prowess on X, Elon Musk was revealed to have been dishonest in some baffling try and acceptable gamer credibility. As the yr wore on, this proved to be simply certainly one of many embarrassing self-owns from the richest man on the planet.

Games have a number of financial and cultural energy. They have been the unique website of the fashionable on-line tradition wars, throughout Gamergate, and now the Trump administration isn’t shy to make use of gamer imagery to mobilise its base. This report from Alyssa Mercante is a narrative about how Pokémon and Halo imagery is getting used to recruit for ICE, but additionally a narrative about the place video games sit now within the wider political context of our instances.

Who wants Grand Theft Auto: the upcoming sport that Guardian readers are most psyched for in 2026 is 007 First Light. Possibly as a result of the movies’ future was nonetheless up within the air when it was introduced, or perhaps as a result of the love for GoldenEye 007 nonetheless runs deep. Joshua Rivera interviews the folks at IO Interactive who persuaded Eon Productions to allow them to free on James Bond.

List options get a foul rap however that is such , considerate instance of the shape, in my (biased) opinion, from Keith Stuart and Christian Donlan. We bear in mind the locations we tread in video games as in the event that they have been actual, and a few of these digital mansions really feel like childhood houses. (We ought to be so fortunate as to develop up in Croft Manor.)

I do know many Pushing Buttons readers are avid gamers of a sure classic. Adrienne Matei speaks to a few of Twitch’s older online game streamers (a lot like to TacticalGramma) to seek out out why half of individuals over 60 play video video games, and the potential advantages of doing so.

This story has been ongoing within the Guardian video games pages for years, ever since Keith wrote what he thought could be a really area of interest article querying why some folks play video games the wrong way up. Finally, after that article impressed an precise scientific research, we now have the reply.

I’ve been within the spaceship sport Star Citizen for a very long time, principally as a result of I’ve puzzled the place the lots of of hundreds of thousands of kilos it has raised in funding have been truly going. (It’s been “in development” since 2012 and its creators don’t faux it’s wherever near completed.) Oliver Holmes talks to gamers to seek out out why they’ve invested hundreds on this science-fiction dream. Since this text was printed, Star Citizen’s income has risen to $924,266,846, and it now has six million gamers.

What to play

This week, I shall be taking part in Guitar Hero and Rock Band, as I’ve babies and might’t exit for Hogmanay. So as a substitute I’m getting all the traditional plastic devices out of the attic and bringing the get together to me. I can’t insist that you simply do something so impractical – final time I attempted this I acquired the dreaded purple ring of demise on my trusty previous Xbox 360 and the entire plan fell aside – however should you do have some forgotten SingStar mics and an previous PlayStation two or three hidden away, that is your PSA that every one of it nonetheless works, and really it’s simply as enjoyable because it was in 2008. Happy new yr!

Available on: 2010s console of your selection
Estimated playtime: Twenty years and counting

What to click on

Question Block

No reader query this week as a result of we’re all nonetheless on vacation, however to kick off 2026, I’d like to ask you to write down in with a number of sentences in your most anticipated sport(s) of the subsequent yr. Just hit reply to this text or e-mail us at [email protected], and your picks may characteristic in a January challenge of the publication.