It’s a weird year for video games. We’re 19 months into a fresh console cycle and support for the PS4 and Xbox One is finally tapering off as developers shift focus to the PS5, Xbox Series X and PC cloud gaming platforms. The pandemic slowed or paused development on a generation of games, and studios of all sizes are being absorbed by the biggest names in the room. The industry is in flux and the rest of the year reflects this instability. Put simply, there aren’t a lot of huge games coming out in the second half of 2022.

Right now, the video game space is made up of delays, big promises and more delays. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to look forward to — between indie and AA developers, cloud libraries and mobile games from Netflix of all companies, this period of transition will still be packed with plenty of things to play.

The 2022 holiday release calendar definitely looks thinner than it did a few months ago, but the first half of the year was fairly busy with games like Horizon Forbidden West, Elden Ring, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Gran Turismo 7, Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. And those are just the well-funded releases with big, shiny ads — the year has also been good for indie and AA titles like Neon White, The Quarry, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, Sifu, Tunic, OlliOlli World and Salt and Sacrifice already available. The summer’s peppered with even more small but fantastic-looking games, like the cyberpunk cat simulator Stray, Sam Barlow’s Immortality and the wildly anticipated Cuphead DLC, all due out by the end of July.

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Weirdly enough, Netflix is also helping to fill in the gaps with a new push into mobile gaming, and its latest titles are a treat. Poinpy, the new game from the creator of Downwell, is particularly addictive. Netflix is also publishing the next titles from the studios behind Monument Valley and Alto’s Odyssey, and all of them are free, without ads or microtransactions, as long as you have an active Netflix subscription.

On top of all that, mid-tier publishers like Devolver and Annapurna have a steady stream of strange, high-quality games coming out at all times. And, of course, there’s Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus Premium, NVIDIA’s GeForce Now and even Google Stadia — cloud-gaming services that bring hundreds of classic and new titles to essentially any device with a screen.

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So, yeah, there are plenty of fresh games heading our way this year; it’s just that there won’t be many AAA blockbusters out of Microsoft or Sony. Whether we like it or not, these studios set the pace of the industry, and gaps in their release schedules can make it feel like development has stagnated across the board. And right now, there are a lot of AAA gaps. What makes it worse is the fact that Microsoft and Sony have announced and then abandoned multiple huge projects over the past few years, giving all of us something concrete to miss in every showcase.

In late 2019 and 2020, Microsoft announced massive games including Fable, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Everwild, Avowed and Outer Worlds 2, and it hasn’t said much more about these projects since. On top of that, there’s everything going on at Bethesda, the largest brand under the Xbox Game Studios banner. Bethesda’s shiny new sci-fi RPG, Starfield, was delayed out of 2022 earlier this year alongside Arkane’s online vampire shooter, Redfall. Meanwhile, it looks like Elder Scrolls 6 has at least five more years left in development, and Fallout 5 may not come out until the next console generation. The biggest Xbox exclusives still landing this year are High on Life, As Dusk Falls and Pentiment, three mid-sized games, two of which were literally announced this month.

Sony is in a similar situation. It has more AAA exclusives hitting the market in the second half of this year than Microsoft, with Forspoken, God of War Ragnarok and The Last of Us remake on the calendar, but there are still plenty of unknowns in the PlayStation lineup. Final Fantasy XVI was a highlight of the PS5 announcement stream in 2020, but we just got a release window of summer 2023 for that one. There’s been zero to little information about other games Sony’s had in the works for years, including Wolverine, the Knights of the Old Republic remake and Spider-Man 2. A standalone multiplayer mode for The Last of Us is still MIA, and we’ve yet to get details on the “multiple game projects” that Naughty Dog is also working on.

There are a couple of big cross-platform games due to come out this holiday season, including Hogwarts Legacy and The Callisto Protocol, but fanfare for these titles has been fairly muted so far.

As for Nintendo, it’s playing by its own rules, as always, and it has Splatoon 3 and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet on the roster this year, plus whatever it announces during its next Direct showcase. It has its own troubles of course — Breath of the Wild 2 was pushed back to 2023, and then there’s Metroid Prime 4, which was announced in 2017 and… yeah.

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The sense of insufficiency in the industry this year is the result of the console makers announcing things too early, with too much fanfare and too many impossible release windows. Of course the pandemic didn’t help, but as it stands, these studios promised the world and then went quiet on multiple massive franchises, and the silence is particularly deafening as we enter an anemic six months of AAA releases. Thankfully, there are so many amazing indie games available right now and coming later in 2022, and between cloud, mobile and PC services, there are more ways to play these titles than ever.

As Jonathan Blow would say, time is a construct anyway, and thinking of life in terms of weeks, months and years is a futile effort to logically contain chaos. Long story short, there’s a lot to look forward to in the video game universe. It may not all be coming this year — or the next, or the next — but with more games to play on more platforms than ever, we should all be plenty entertained.

Two weeks after release, Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal has earned approximately $24 million for the troubled studio, according to Appmagic. In an estimate it shared with GameDev Reports, the analytics firm said the free-to-play game was downloaded almost 8.5 million times over the same timeframe, with 26 percent of downloads originating in the US. The bulk of Blizzard’s revenue from Diablo Immortal has also come from America. To date, US players contributed about 43 percent of all the game’s earnings.

To put Immortal’s early financial success in context, Hearthstone, the only other mobile game Blizzard has out at the moment, earned about $5 million in May. Despite the vocal backlash to Immortal’s monetization systems, it’s probably safe to say no one expected the game to fail out of the gate. Instead, the worry for many fans was a scenario where Immortal was so successful for Blizzard that it went on to inform how the studio monetizes its future games.

For the time being, that fear seems unfounded. Diablo franchise general manager Rod Fergusson recently said Diablo IV would feature a different set of monetization systems than Immortal. “To be clear, D4 is a full-price game built for PC/PS/Xbox audiences,” he tweeted after the game’s recent showing at Microsoft’s recent Summer Game Fest presentation. Separately, Blizzard announced this week Overwatch 2 would do away with loot boxes.

Epic Games has added a long-awaited feature to its store: user ratings. The company says that only those who have played a game for at least two hours will be able to rate it on a five-star scale. Not everyone will be able to rate a game either. Epic will randomly offer players the chance to score a game after they finish a play session. The company believes this approach will prevent review bombing and make sure ratings are from people who are actually playing the games.

An overall rating will be calculated based on players' scores and this will appear on a title's Epic Games Store page. The aim, of course, is to help users figure out whether a game's worth playing. Store pages already featured critics' reviews to help folks make a decision about whether to buy or download something.

Epic says it likely won't ask for ratings on every game or app and the randomization approach will help it avoid spamming players. That seems like a good call. It's a little annoying, for instance, that Microsoft asks for feedback after every Xbox Cloud Gaming session.

Epic Games

In addition, Epic may ask you to answer a poll after a game session. There's a broad range of questions, including the likes of whether a game is better to play with a team or how challenging the combat is. 

Epic will use data from polls to create tags for store pages. Eventually, tags will be used on category pages and to create tag-based categories for the home page. The idea is to improve discoverability and help people gain a better understanding of what to expect from a game. 

Separately, Epic is releasing a set of cross-play tools for developers. Epic Online Services now offers an overlay that can merge Steam and Epic Games friends lists and help players find their buds, send friend requests and hop into multiplayer sessions with cross-platform in-game invites.

Epic has broader ambitions for cross-play support beyond Steam. It's working to support other PC launchers, as well as macOS and Linux. It will add cross-play tools for consoles and mobile to the SDK further down the line. Several of Epic's own games — including Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout — have full cross-play support.

Microsoft is adding a useful feature to the Xbox PC app that should help save you some time if it turns out your setup won't be able to run a particular game. The company started testing the game performance indicator in December and it's rolling out the tool now. 

"The app compares the game’s performance on PCs with similar specs to yours to show a prediction of how well we expect the game to run," Tila Nguyen, senior product manager lead for Xbox Experiences, wrote on the Xbox blog. "If your PC isn’t up to the task of running a graphically demanding game, you’ll be able to view the game’s system requirements to get more details on what you need to run the game."

You may not see a performance check for every game, since Microsoft might not have enough information from other players' PCs to be able to make a recommendation. This is particularly the case for new titles with a smaller install base.

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This is a handy tool that should save you some wasted effort, even if you might be disappointed to find out a game you were excited for won't work on your system. It could be especially welcome for those with a data cap. The feature should help them avoid wasting precious data by prompting them to refrain from downloading a game they can't actually play.

It may also save players from resorting to third-party system requirement checkers, such as Can You Run It. Everything they need to know should be right there in the Xbox app.

In addition, the blog post notes that Microsoft recently improved navigation in the app. Navigation is now all in the sidebar and you can view game install progress via a queue on the bottom left of the window. You'll get a notification when a game finishes installing too. Search is said to be better as well. It now includes EA Play and Ubisoft Connect titles in the results.

Nreal users can now play some Steam games on their augmented reality glasses. The Chinese company has released the beta version of "Steam on Nreal," which gives users a way to stream games from their PC to their AR eyewear. Nreal admits that installing the beta release will require a bit of effort during the setup process, and the current version is not optimized for all Steam games just yet. It will work on both Nreal Light and Nreal Air models, though, and it already supports some popular titles like the entire Halo series. 

To note, users can already play games on Nreal's glasses by accessing Xbox Cloud Gaming on a browser inside the company's 3D system called Nebula. But Steam on Nreal will give users who don't have Xbox accounts the opportunity to see what gaming on the device would be like. Company co-founder Peng Jin said the beta release is "meant to give people a glimpse into what is possible." He added: "AAA games should be played on a 200-inch HD screen and they should be played free of location restrictions."

Nreal launched its Light mixed reality glasses in 2020 after a US court ruled in its favor for the lawsuit filed by Magic Leap. The American company accused its former employee Chi Xu of using stolen secrets to set up Nreal, but the court decided that Magic Leap failed to make any viable claim. In 2021, Nreal launched a new model called Air that was designed with streaming shows and playing mobile games in mind. Air looks more like a pair of ordinary sunglasses than its predecessor does, and it also comes with a better display.

In an effort to offer more content and perhaps entice those on the fence to grab a pair of its glasses, Nreal has also announced AR Jam, an online international contest for AR developers that will kick off on June 27th. Developers can compete in various categories that include at-home fitness, art, games and video, with each one having a $10,000 grand prize. Those interested can head over to the company's Developer page for more information.

GSC Game World hopes to release Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl next year. The studio shared the updated release window in a trailer it premiered Tuesday during Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase Extended livestream. GSC had previously planned to release the game by the end of this year, but the likelihood of that happening diminished after the company was forced to pause development due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Some fans spotted Stalker 2’s new release window when Microsoft shared an update on Xbox Game Pass during its Xbox and Bethesda showcase on Sunday. "It happened a little bit earlier than expected, we were actually planning to reveal it in the upcoming days," a GSC Game World spokesperson told PC Gamer on Monday. "But yes, the game now releases in 2023."

Alongside a fresh trailer, the studio released a new vlog detailing some of the hardships its staff has had to endure since the conflict in Ukraine began. GSC recently resumed work on Stalker 2 after relocating some of its team members to Prague. The studio also changed the game’s subtitle from “Heart of Chernobyl” to “Chornobyl” to reflect the local Ukrainian spelling of the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster.

The hit Viking survival sim Valheim is heading to Xbox and PC Game Pass, complete with full crossplay support with the Steam version of the game. Valheim will hit PC Game Pass first, landing in fall of 2022. It'll come to Xbox Series X and S, and hit Xbox Game Pass same-day in early 2023.

Valheim was a breakout hit of 2021, selling nearly 6 million copies in its first five weeks on Steam Early Access and outstripping established titles like Dota 2 in terms of active players. It ended up as one of the top-earning games on Steam in 2021 overall. The original development team at Iron Gate was just five people, but they've since hired on some more folks.

“We’re doing our best,” Iron Gate co-founder Henrik Tornqvist told Engadget in March 2021. “It has become pretty hectic around here since launch.”

Valheim offers an expansive, collaborative universe of hunting, crafting, sailing, building and defeating mythical Norse beasts, and its launch on Xbox Game Pass marks its debut outside of the Steam ecosystem. With so many players already on Steam, crossplay support is key.

Diablo IV will feature a different set of monetization systems than those found in Diablo Immortal, according to Blizzard. “To be clear, D4 is a full-price game built for PC/PS/Xbox audiences,” said Diablo franchise general manager Rod Fergusson following the game’s latest showing during Microsoft’s Summer Game Fest presentation on Sunday. “We are committed to delivering an incredible breadth of content after launch, for years to come, anchored around optional cosmetic items and full story-driven expansions.”

Blizzard has similarly promised to support the recently released Immortal for a while but is doing so through an in-game marketplace where players can purchase optional cosmetics, an “empowered” battle pass and “eternal orbs,” a premium currency that can be exchanged for the game’s controversial “legendary” crests. The consensus among the gaming community is that Immortal features some of the most aggressive and predatory monetization systems found in a Blizzard game to date. One estimate suggests it would take someone 10 years or $110,000 to acquire enough “legendary gems” to equip their character with the best possible gear. Since the release of Immortal, Diablo fans have been worried that Blizzard would employ a similar set of monetization systems in Diablo 4 when that game comes out in 2023.

However, Fergusson’s statement suggests Diablo IV will be closer to Diablo III than Immortal. The former did not feature microtransactions – though it launched with a controversial in-game auction house – and Blizzard went on to support the title with a $40 expansion in 2014 and a $15 DLC in 2017 that added Diablo 2’s necromancer class to the game. Still, reading through Fergusson’s Twitter replies, you see a lot of fans expressing concern that even the mention of cosmetics could imply more microtransactions than Blizzard is suggesting. Neither Fergusson nor Diablo community lead Adam Fletcher mentioned a paid battle pass, but that’s one way Blizzard could make some cosmetics obtainable since many games, including Immortal, incorporate them as a completion reward.

The rumors were true: Hideo Kojima has confirmed his next game will be published by Xbox Game Studios. During Microsoft's Xbox and Bethesda showcase today, Kojima said there has been a game he's always wanted to create, which will be like "no one has ever experienced or seen before." Now, thanks to Microsoft's cloud technology, he says it's possible. Kojima admitted it "may take some time" before the game is completed, but that's to be expected at this point.

While there aren't any other official details about the game yet, journalist Tom Henderson recently reported that Kojima's next project was a horror game called Overdose. He described footage of the actress Margaret Qualley walking through environments with a flashlight—you know, the sort of thing you'd expect a character in a horror game to do. Kojima Productions also asked him to take down the report, which suggests it may be accurate.

A new Minecraft game has made its world premiere at the Xbox Summer Games Fest — one where you'll be able to build structures and command your allies to fight enemies. Xbox Games Studios has showcased a short clip of Minecraft Legends at the event and has also announced that the new action-strategy game is coming sometime in 2023. It was developed in partnership with Blackbird Interactive and will feature an online campaign co-op and a competitive multiplayer mode. Dennis Ries, the game's executive producer, said the studio will announce more information about them later this year.

In Minecraft Legends, you'll need to protect the Overworld, with its rich nature and resources, from an invading army of piglins. You'll have to forge alliances with mobs and lead them into strategic battles against the invading forces. Ries said the "game will have a very exciting campaign that will introduce many surprises for both new and seasoned Minecraft player alike." The studio has only shared a few details about the upcoming game for now, though, and has promised to reveal more about it soon. You can also follow the official Minecraft LegendsTwitter account to keep up with the latest news about the game.