Astro Bot is the game of 2024. Now what?

It’s not December without the Game Awards, Jeff Keely’s annual awards trailer showcase and a casual awards ceremony honoring the biggest games of the year. More than previous years, this year’s Game of the Year nominees were a diverse mix of heavy hitters such as Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Metaphor: ReFantasia and surprise darlings Balatro and The Wukong Black Myth. And the winner turned out to be…Astro Bot, the exclusive platformer for PlayStation 5 from Team Asobi.

We’ve had the Game Awards for a decade now, and they’re a little different when it comes to picking GOTYs: past games like The Witcher 3, The God of War 2018 reboot and Baldur’s Gate 3 were these fantasy or mature titles and Astro Bot is a family-oriented game about a cute robot with a big head who explores worlds and befriends cute Funko-sized versions of PlayStation characters. It’s a very good game, but the win was definitely surprising, especially when Balatro had conquered the world for months and A metaphor also took off in its own way. Now that the dust has settled, the question on people’s minds is what it means for a platformer to win a top prize at what is a major media awards ceremony.

The immediate next step will almost certainly be some kind of sequel; Team Asobi is currently releasing free post-launch levels for Astro Bot, which she sold 1.5 million copies since last November. No doubt Sony will let Asobi cook and when the next game is revealed I hope so Astro the series takes its first step towards building its own identity. Both Bot and its predecessor Astro’s game room (which came pre-installed on PS5s at launch) were tours of PlayStation’s past. It’s a lot of fun to see little versions of childhood mascots with big heads, but constant winking it can get tiresome pretty quickly and highlights how the series has nothing but references and great game mechanics. The argument might make it need nothing more, but having a unique personality is what has helped other platformers endure. Of the big three publishers, Nintendo is really the only one that fully realizes this, and that’s why Mario is able to maintain such overall consistency, even when the character (and Luigi) are platforming while jumping between a dozen other genres at any given moment. So if Sony wants its own Mario, it will mean figuring out who Astro is beyond a blank slate dressed in the skin of its old series.

Speaking of franchises, one of the other big surprises at the Game Awards came from Capcom, which revealed it’s developing new games for eyes and Onimusha franchises. The Resident Evil the studio has had a really good run of releases lately and recently stated that the two projects are part of a larger effort to series revival previously postponed. You have to imagine that Sony is watching this from the sidelines Astro Botalso – many PlayStation franchises get some love in this game, and fans have been hoping for years for some of them to be beaten. Many also hoped for collapse of Concord okay On Astro success was a wake-up call for Sony to focus on producing smaller, more diverse games instead of putting their eggs in the cinematic, triple basket. This is a problem in the industry since years, especially for PlayStation first party teamsand not recognizing this problem sooner is how he ended up getting laid off over 1000 developers this year and the cancellation of several projects.

It’s a shame that PlayStation’s devotion to blockbusters has led to the erosion of double-A genrebecause that’s where many of their older franchises would probably work best these days. (See also: Ubisoft is pretty good Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown from earlier this year.) Lately I’ve been replaying Sly 2: Band of Thieves after being ported to the PS5 for the first time as well Resistance 2 cloud streaming playback. Both feel right for their individual eras, and it’s easy to imagine that their respective series could have a place in the current PlayStation pantheon if they were allowed to simply be without huge expectations placed on them. Sly could easily fill the niche for stylish, personality-filled games after last year’s hi-fi fever, and Resistance or Killzone could be a good exclusive shooter for the system – last year Sony tried to stop Microsoft from buying Activision Blizzard, arguing Call of Duty it was too precious too there is no other shooter may hope to surpass it. Ideally, neither should aim for such lofty heights, but serve as PlayStation’s answer to halo, which itself is about to undergo a second or third reconstruction, will be appreciated. As it stands, any hopes for mid-sized non-Nintendo games with brand recognition now fall squarely on Astro’s small, delicate shoulders.

Team Asobi is not expected to use Astro Bot to fix everything wrong with triple-A gaming overnight just has the unfortunate luck of arriving as the industry’s calculations of several years of calculated risks don’t pay off as expected. Creating a healthier industry will take time, and its impact will be felt sooner or later, even if it’s only in its own sequel or an indie game that hopes to capture some of its unbridled, uncorporate spirit.

Or if that fails, PlayStation can ditch the remasters and remakes and just please put more of its older first-party titles on PC or natively on the PlayStation 5.

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