![]() Further, while we love remade versions of our favorite games as much as the next person, remakes generally aren’t considered for “major” awards, as a category should be able to stand on its original releases, no matter how amazing a remake is. Due to time and reviewer constraints, we’ve allowed some winners that were not reviewed this year (unlike prior years), so as to represent the field a bit more evenly. When choosing our games to award this year, our thought process going in considers a few major points when doling out awards. The PC continued its strong release lineup, as the indie game market has flourished under the Steam Greenlight program and numerous developers are also using Early Access to fine-tune their games to player expectations, making games more and more likely to catch the eyes of players before their “official” launch. The handheld market flourished due to the aforementioned lack of hardware changes, and both the 3DS and Vita saw a good influx of content that made them worth owning. Only Nintendo had a strong showing of exclusives this year, due to a combination of strong in-house support and personally financed projects, but their third-party support suffered astronomically as a result, leaving the Wii U a console that will be supported by them once again, so far. The end result was a year where much-hyped projects were, in many cases, underwhelming, broken, or both, and very few console exclusives really popped up to make one console feel like a better investment than the other. On the release front, the aforementioned new consoles threw a bit of a wrench into things developers who’d originally been planning releases for last generation’s consoles moved projects around, and new projects were delayed or pushed into readiness without being fully complete. The mobile phone market, in other words, is quickly ramping up to be a true competitor to the handheld game market, at a time when handheld gaming is starting to show a bit of flux, and it’ll be interesting to see where that goes from here. Perhaps most interesting, however, was the sudden rise of attention towards the mobile phone gaming market after years of mobile games being little more than freemium releases that, if they were good enough, made it to the consoles or handhelds, this year saw developers sink real attention into the market that has been generally used for “free” games or rereleases of older games at exorbitant prices. This wasn’t just because of the technology changes in the console market, however after a couple lackluster years, Sony’s handheld struck back hard, as a massive influx of must-have titles graced the handheld and made it a truly viable contender in the handheld ecosystem for the first time since its release… right as Sony announced the Playstation TV, a streaming box that also allows players to play some Vita games on their television, thus undermining the Vita right as it’s becoming strong. Due to the expanded focus on the current generation consoles, however, this ended up meaning that all three consoles had less than stellar years creatively while Nintendo saw an influx of strong in-house and financed releases, Sony and Microsoft were hampered by their new hardware, and the platforms that had the best overall years ended up being the handhelds and the PC, as there were no significant tech changes for them to deal with (though with Nintendo’s upcoming New 3DS that may change in 2015). This was the first full year after the release of not one, but two new consoles, both of which had a lot to prove, and in the span of a year it’s become apparent that Sony is clearly the leader of the pack, having sold nearly twenty million units worldwide, while Microsoft and Nintendo combined are struggling to reach that number. It seems, to many, that 2014 was not a great year for gaming, and it’s not hard to see why people might feel that way, frankly. So here we are, at the beginning of 2015, looking back on the accomplishments, good and bad, in gaming for the year 2014.
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