2025 was my shippingest year of my life
In 2025, a lot of game studios ran flat out of money and got their games out the door in an existential race to survive. So I suspect it was a very shipping-oriented year for a lot of people. For me, it was the shippingest year I've ever had in my life, and not really because anything I was on was running out of money. It just turned out that way, somehow.
I worked on four games that came out for the first time in 2025, narrowly beating my previous best year, 2023, when I released three. 2025's games were:
- Skin Deep, which I talk about here all the time, with Blendo. I was the narrative director and writer of this project.
- Hyper Light Breaker, which came out in early access at Heart Machine. I was the narrative director of this project after joining it halfway through development in 2023.
- Possessors, also with Heart Machine. I wrote a fuck ton of this game - though I joined late in production I oversaw two full end to end rewrites of the main plot, and added nearly all the optional content myself, including the vast majority of the side conversations between the two protagonists, and all the side quests.
- Young Suns, which I contracted on, came out on Xbox's early access program but will eventually be on Steam as well.
This may be peak for me in my life. I genuinely don't I could ever bank on having a five-game year, even if I had a ton of contracting gigs - it just doesn't seem likely, and that rate of work doesn't seem like a direction my life might be headed in. A five game year would certainly contain a level of frantic labor that I think I might not enjoy!!
Some thoughts I'm having about game dev as 2026 gets started:
- All these games are coming out on Steam, or launched on Steam to begin with. When I started my career, in 2011, people were talking about PC gaming being dead... which seems kind of insane now. I'm starting the 15th year of my career having launched 15 separate games on Steam. PC gaming might get decidedly more Linux-flavored, but it feels pretty crazy to look back on what people were saying 15 years ago and to realize that the PC has been my career's primary platform.
- The people who do business at games companies don't just not understand games. They also do not understand business. They operate entirely on vibes and schmooze energy and are flying completely blind. It'll be a couple more decades before I can start telling some of my crazier stories on this topic without risk of getting blackballed. (Everyone has stories like that; I'm not special.) 2025 sure as fuck gave me some new ones.
- I really can't tell anymore whether this is "the worst it can get." The idea of being jobless was a lot scarier to me when I had a job, and everyone being laid off felt like it would be the end of the fucking world; now that I and most of my friends are all laid off, it suddenly feels like it could still somehow get worse for all of us. Not really sure what to do with that vague feeling. It's possibly just my self-defensively negative worldview protecting me from disappointment again.
- A lot of great games came out in 2025 specifically because everyone was running out of money and needed to make a mad grasp for success. A lot of these games not no coverage at all.
- Marketing is like, a completely collapsed discipline. Nobody knows how to do it anymore. It's completely unclear to me whether the audience is paying attention to anything any of us do to sell videogames.
While I was shipping all these games, I missed playing a lot of 2025's biggest releases. I have not played Expedition 33. I started playing Silksong for the first time today. I've been laid off since October, but I've been so busy with weird and unpleasant shit that I've barely had time to be properly lazy.
Here's hoping 2026 has some lazy months in it for me!