🎄 A Christmas Letter to an Industry That Refuses to Disappear
Hello there.
This year was heavy for the games industry. Layoffs, closures, public fights about AI, pricing pressure, creative burnout, and losses that reminded everyone there are real people behind every logo and franchise. For a medium built on imagination, 2025 often felt brutally real.
And yet, here we are. Still playing. Still building. Still arguing about what games should be. Still caring.
This is not a “best of the year” article. It is not a rankings piece or a victory lap. This is a Christmas letter. A pause. A moment to acknowledge what this industry went through, and why it is still standing.
Games did not save the industry this year. People did.
Developers who shipped anyway. Artists who kept iterating. Designers who rewrote systems one more time. Producers who tried to hold teams together while the ground shifted underneath them. Players who were more selective, more vocal, and more honest with their wallets than ever before.
We saw power concentrate, labor organize, and technology accelerate faster than comfort allowed. We saw unions form. We saw acquisitions reshape futures. We saw AI spark fear, curiosity, shortcuts, and real conversations that are not going away. None of it was clean. None of it was simple.
But something important happened quietly in the background.
Players started making the call.
They pushed back on prices. They rewarded smaller teams. They supported games that respected their time. They ignored what did not. The market did not collapse. It adapted. Slowly. Unevenly. Humanly.
That matters.
It means this industry is not just driven by scale or spectacle. It is still shaped by trust. By care. By whether a game feels honest when you sit down with it after a long day.
Christmas is a strange moment for games. For some people, they are background noise during family visits. For others, they are an escape. For many, they are company. Something familiar in a year that changed too much, too fast.
So this letter is not about celebrating releases. It is about recognizing endurance.
To the developers who lost colleagues, studios, or projects this year. You mattered. Your work mattered.
To the players who questioned where their money, time, and attention were going. You mattered too.
To the people still trying to build a healthier future for games, even when the incentives push the other way. Especially you.
The industry is bruised, not broken.
There is room for better tools, better labor practices, better pricing models, better conversations, and better games. None of that happens overnight. But hope in this industry has never come from certainty. It has always come from stubbornness.
From people who refuse to let games become smaller than what they can be.
From people who keep showing up.
From people who still believe that interactive worlds can mean something.
This Christmas, Game Cookies is live. And we are grateful you are here with us.
Thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting this space, especially during a year that tested the industry and the people inside it. We will have a proper New Year letter soon, but until then, we will keep posting, reflecting, and following the stories that matter.
Take a breath. Play something you enjoy. Rest if you can.
🦊 Kiki · 🍪 Chip · ⭐ Byte · 🦁 Leo
