Video games in 2022: Massive mergers and peculiar portables

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The game industry can be too focused on what's next. Newly released blockbusters can fade from the public consciousness in a matter of days, while the "Next generation" of console hardware can dominate the headlines.

Major trends in the industry can be reviewed over a period of longer than a few days. There are a few clear storylines from the big gaming news of the year.

Big game publishers get even bigger

Giant companies acquiring one another to get even more gigantic was one of the trends that defined the game business in the 21st century. Major conglomerates like Sony, Take-Two, and the Embracer Group spent a lot of money to fill gaps in their portfolios.

But one proposed merger stood out above them all; the $68.7 billion marriage proposal that Microsoft offered to Activision Blizzard back in January. The move could be seen as an opportunistic one for Microsoft, since Activision's market value fell quite a bit amid 2021's many harassment and discrimination scandals and investigations. It's also an acquisition that could offer beleaguered Activision CEO Bobby Kotick a golden parachute to escape the turmoil.

The biggest concern for the gaming community after the announcement was whether or not Call of Duty would be available on other platforms. Microsoft has made a number of promises that it doesn't want to lock games from other companies to the console.

Those assurances so far haven't proven enough for Sony or for antitrust regulators who now seem poised to put the proposed merger in serious jeopardy. After prodding by US senators, the Federal Trade Commission officially filed suit to block the merger, citing antitrust concerns. Regulators in the UK and the EU are also in the midst of serious investigations that could lead to similar attempts to stop the merger.

The markets seem pretty sure that the deal will go through.

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The year of weird portables

Nintendo has been in charge of portable gaming for a long time. For years, no one has bothered to release portable gaming hardware to challenge Nintendo's Switch or the popular mobile gaming devices.

In the year 2022, a number of companies pushed gaming portables that were decidedly off-kilter. It started with the Analogue Pocket, which was launched in late 2021. The Pocket's solid industrial design and high end screen make it great for replaying thousands of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games. The introduction of new emulation cores this year made this device a must-have for retro gaming.

This was also the year Valve got into portable hardware. The Steam Deck has been at or near the top of Steam's own sales charts since its launch, even as initial supply shortages have given way to wider availability. The hardware has some limitations—screen quality, battery life, sheer bulk, and Anti-Cheat compatibility among them. Still, the Linux-based device has proven "good enough" for putting thousands of "Deck Verified" or "Deck Playable" titles in PC gamers' hands. No wonder Valve is already talking about a follow-up. On the other end of the mass market spectrum, the quirky and delayed Playdate used 2022 to prove that portable gaming can be cute, lighthearted, and fun. The bright yellow portable doesn't even have a backlight or a color screen, but it does have a novel crank controller on its side and a wide variety of inventive indie games powered by a robust homebrew community.

A few companies released dedicated portable hardware for the streaming gaming market. The generic dual-stick controls of the G Cloud and Edge 5G allow for easy access to a variety of streaming services and classic emulators. It's too early to tell if these devices will find a market that's not served by existing controller attachment. They help cement the fact that handheld gaming is more than just for Nintendo.

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NFTs? Gamers say "No f'ing thanks"

Axie Infinity served as a proof-of-concept for the "pay-to-earn" model.">

Large portions of the game industry were poised to go all-in on NFTs and their promise of "unique" collectibles, either as in-game items or trading cards. Peter Molyneux's startup raising $54 million in NFT sales in a single week was one of the big stories of the year. The in-game NFT program was launched in 2021 and was defended by the company.

As the year wore on, though, the bloom started to come off the NFT rose in a big way. Axie Infinity—once held up as the prime example of a successful "play to earn" game—saw its economy all but collapse before a major crypto hack wiped out any remaining confidence that was left in the game or its crypto tokens. GameStop's NFT marketplace eventually launched to slow sales that got even slower as time went on, though it proved a boon to scammers selling unlicensed games. Ubisoft, meanwhile, demurely paused its own NFT sales and later tried to pretend it was never all that interested in the space. High-profile failures like these—and a wider collapse in crypto and NFT prices in general—led to a massive vibe shift away from NFTs among many game companies. Games from Eve Online to Minecraft to Grand Theft Auto explicitly rejected the use of NFTs, at least in part because they had already built highly lucrative in-game economies without blockchain technology. The International Game Developers Association said it would take a "stronger stance" on the ethics of NFTs. And Sony seemed to go out of its way to note that its new line of PlayStation digital collectibles didn't use crypto or the blockchain in any way.

There will still be investors willing to place large monetary bets on the still-unproven space in the years to come. As the year ends, there are fewer and fewer people who are confident in the future of gaming.