Polygon’s Editor’s Letter is a column from Editor-in-Chief Chris Plante that reflects on the video game and entertainment industries, their communities, and Polygon itself. New editions appear in the first week of each month.

The past 12 months will be remembered for an estimated 14,600 layoffs, a drought of venture capital investment, and the first “unrelease” of a major first-party game. When “sluggish growth” is the silver lining, you know things are rough.

2025 — a year stuffed with promising new hardware and game releases — should be better. And yet, 2024’s cloud of discomforting uncertainty lingers. Will 2025 actually be a better year for the video game industry than 2024?

Picture the classic zombie-movie trope in which a band of traveling survivors finally reaches a safe zone, only to wonder, as the barricade rises, whether the open arms of fellow survivors will greet them… or a horde of feral cannibals.

2025 could echo 2012, when THQ and 538 Game filed for Chapter 11, Nintendo launched the doomed Wii U, Zynga’s social game model came crashing back to Earth, and Sony invested over $380 million in cloud gaming.

Or maybe change will break in the other direction. 2025 might resemble 2020, when Microsoft shrewdly acquired Bethesda and parent company ZeniMax, Microsoft and Sony launched a successful new generation of home consoles, and the collision of the COVID-19 pandemic (bad!) and an abundance of free-to-play mobile games like Among Us (good!) inspired a new era of social gaming.

Here are the six storylines that will decide the outcome of the year to come.

Ubisoft ascended to top-tier publisher status in the mid-2000s, riding the success of Assassin’s Creed,........

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