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Biggest announcements from the Game Developers Conference 2025
We've just wrapped up an entire week of the Game Developers Conference. Held every year in San Francisco, GDC is an opportunity for developers to come together and celebrate the industry by giving awards to their favorite games and leading talks where they walk through their successes, failures, and plans for the future. Around 30,000 people attended the event, but for those of you who couldn't make it, here are the biggest announcements of GDC 2025.
5. Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead was asked to give a talk at the United Nations
Yeah, you read that right. During the "Helldivers 2: Capturing Lightning in a Bottle" talk, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt announced that the United Nations had been in touch to ask if members of the studio would be up for giving a talk about "psychological defense against manipulation."
Helldivers 2 is a fascist parody wherein the citizens of Super Earth are indoctrinated into a fight against otherworldly bugs and bots, much like the plot of Starship Troopers. "We asked ourselves, 'could we brainwash an entire community to fight for a fascist state? Would they? Would we be okay with that?'," Pilestedt said. "And turns out, yeah, actually."
Lots of us have had fun roleplaying in Helldivers, threatening to turn our teammates in for undemocratic thoughts. Is that proof we're easy to manipulate, or were we all in on the joke?
4. Honor of Kings: World had a closed playtest
Honor of Kings is a game that's incredibly popular in China and relatively unknown elsewhere. You should know it though, because it was the highest-grossing mobile game of 2024 - and allegedly the "world's most played mobile MOBA". It's a 5v5 like League of Legends, and Honor of Kings World is an open-world action RPG spin-off coming to PC and consoles, set within the same world as the mobile game.
It's been almost four years since it was first announced, and its Monster Hunter-style seems to have changed into something more akin to Genshin Impact. Some lucky people have been able to try it out in a secretive playtest, but the rest of us will have to make do with a trailer. Hopefully we get to read people's impressions soon.
3. Netflix is getting its first MMO, a cozy co-op life sim called Spirit Crossing
Netflix's gaming ambitions have been all over the place these last few years. It had high hopes but has seen cancellations and layoffs, just like the rest of the industry. Spirit Crossing is a piece of interesting news though. Its trailer shows off a cute cartoon aesthetic, and we see characters gliding around and building houses on mountaintops.
I'm curious to see how an MMO will work on Netflix. It has the infrastructure for streaming, so maybe this will be the first multiplayer game to launch without server issues.
2. Balatro wins Game of the Year at the Developer's Choice Awards
Could it have been any other game, really? No, I don't think so. Balatro has become an absolute phenomenon. I struggled with it at first because I actually know how to play poker, so unlearning all of its rules and realizing sometimes, a pair is better than a royal flush was difficult, but once the game clicks it's unbelievably moreish. We definitely don't play it at work during meetings.
It also won Best Design, Best Debut, and the Innovation Award. Solo developer LocalThunk has worked incredibly hard on Balatro, but he warns others not to look to him for advice because "I only have one data point."
1. The first industry-wide North American video game workers union has been made
It's been a rough few years for the video game industry. We all flocked to video games during Covid lockdowns, and so a lot of numbers on many spreadsheets went up, but once we could go outside and started putting the controllers down, some of those numbers didn't go up as fast as they had been before. Developers have borne the brunt of this, with thousands being laid off in the last couple of years. Add to that the historically poor way those in quality assurance (QA) get treated, many studios enforcing a return to office work, even for remote workers who live halfway across the country, and the use of AI in development, and it's easy to see why developers need a union.
Some studios and departments have successfully organized in the last few years, such as Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, ZeniMax, and CD Projekt Red. Most of the unions in North America were formed under the Communication Workers of America guild, but now, the UVW-CWA has been created. It's the United Videogame Workers union, and it works jointly with the CWA.
This is a landmark union as any artist, writer, designer, QA tester, or programmer in North America can join. It doesn't matter if they're a freelancer or a full-time dev, and they don't need the rest of their workplace to join; they can become a member independently of any employer. Its mission is to "not only build community and solidarity amongst video game workers, but also to build large-scale education campaigns about labor organizing in the video game industry."
The union hosted a rally and a launch party at GDC, and I hope a lot of people sign up for it, as there's strength in numbers. This union is a beacon of hope after years mired in darkness.
