SmashPad’s Top 10 Games of 2025

Like last year, 2025 has been a year of great and bad moments, so let’s look back at what stood out the most for us.

There are still too many layoffs, and they still suck

When it comes to games industry employment, things are still bleak. Although 2025 saw a significant reduction in the rate of gaming industry layoffs compared to 2024’s peak, total job losses remained high. Over 10,000 people reportedly lost their jobs in 2025 (seemingly down from 15,000), with companies like Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Amazon continuing their cuts and impacting major studios and indies. At least this year, it was less about downsizing and more about restructuring, but it hardly seemed that way for both EA and Microsoft.

Microsoft laid off 4% of its workforce leading to the closure of The Initiative and the cancellation of Perfect Dark. Not to be outdone, EA laid off ~400 people, with a sizable chunk of them being people at Respawn and Codemasters. Not to be outdone, EA also announced its intent to be acquired as a private company by various Saudi Arabian suitors. With the deal expected to close in early 2026, who knows what’s looming? Spoiler: It’ll lead to more layoffs.

Let’s pour one out for the studios that are no longer with us:

• The Initaitive
• Eidos-Montreal
• NetEase Seattle
• Fantastic Pixel Castle
• Bad Brain Games
• Monolith Productions
• Arkane Austin
• London Studio
• Pixelopus
• RIot Forge
• Redhill Games
• Toadman Interactive
• Counterplay
• FreeJam
• The Outsiders
• T-Minus Zero Entertainment
• Cobra Mobile

There’s definitely more here that’s missing, but that doesn’t take away from our main point that it hurts the industry. Most of the people in the industry are in it because they’re passionate about video games. There are all sorts of people both employed and recently unemployed by the industry that are more creative and talented than most people, yet they decided to pursue and work for less because it was their life’s dream to be in games. Take our own Danreb Victorio for instance, who worked in mobile games for seven years with the hopes of taking his talents to AAA, but instead was laid off in 2024. He luckily found another opportunity at Gamers Outreach, but took a 30% pay cut from his last salary.

“The six months I spent unemployed were the worst months in my life. You don’t understand how desperate you can be when things feel hopeless, and I definitely felt that way. I don’t want anybody feeling this way, and that’s why I hosted a Career Day with the Filipino Alumni Network of San Jose State, and I had Belinda Garcia-Maguid (former writer with Sledgehammer and Crystal Dynamics) as my featured speaker to talk about carving your own path. A few weeks later, she gets cut, and then Crystal Dynamics puts out this banger trailer at The Game Awards. As much as I want to play it, it also would make me feel guilty because of the friendship I made. This can’t go on. These are real people.”

A lot of us have a love and passion for the gaming industry that’s unquestioned, but when it constantly shows it doesn’t love you back, why continue? We ask ourselves that every day.

Well, it can be argued that there’s more great games than ever.

SmashPad’s Biggest Year Ever

Before we move on to our Top 10, let’s reflect a little more on what we’ve been able to accomplish this year.

If you’ve followed us for a while, you’d know full well what we are. We’re scrappy. This site makes no money and doesn’t even really try to. For a while, most of the games we reviewed were bought with the staff’s own money. That being said, it’s hard to motivate people when you don’t pay them and the existence of the site is a detriment to our wallets.

But that’s what makes us special.

We write, stream, and edit because we want to. Lately, we’ve gotten lucky with codes, and we don’t ever want to take that for granted. It’s written in our review policy that nothing is promised in return for a review copy or code. But when we’re being given the opportunity to create content at no cost for us other than the work it takes to get it up. We’ll produce, and that’s exactly what we did. You’ve undoubtedly seen reviews from publishers like Square Enix, Capcom, Bandai Namco, Sega, Microsoft, as well as some indies and a bunch of others go up when the embargo lifts, because we’ve finally established some trust. It took more than a decade to get there, but we’re there.

Let’s give a hand to the SmashPad staff for coming up big with the content this year, and because we think it’s important to recognize individual accomplishments, we want to pump these folks up.

• Filippo Dinolfo: Fil recently came back to help manage the back end again while also turning it up with both game and hardware reviews. He wrote nine reviews, a review in progress, and an accessibility preview. His perspective was sorely missed, and we’re glad to have him back more than contributing.
• Michael Fertitta: Despite the games media landscape being new to him and only having a Switch, he wrote embargoed reviews since his start in late July after we found him on LinkedIn. He now works for Triple Point PR but does make it a point to still contribute when and where he can.
• Chris Selogy: Chris is ALWAYS there for both the podcasts and the streams and also started doing written reviews again. He’s an important backbone for us.
• Myles Obenza: Initially brought on by Danreb to help his own site in Temple of Geek, Myles has brought a lot of enthusiasm and skillful wordcraft to his pieces with SmashPad, and we appreciate everything he’s been able to do for us in such short a time.
• Theresa Samons: Our copy chief extraordinaire has also made herself available for the occasional cozy review.
• Brandon Perkins: Brandon has also been a stalwart for us as he’s there for every podcast we do on top of bringing in his loud reviewing style to our writing.
• Leigh Lamb: It’s special when Leigh writes a review, because he pours everything he has into it. Look at his Ninja Gaiden 4 review. We look forward to seeing more from him in 2026.
• Danreb Victorio: Not only does he run and pay for the site, he’s done all the travel he could to events like the Game Developers Conference, Summer Game Fest, PAX West, and The Game Awards for the sake of not only getting us content, but making connections with publishers, PR people, and freelancers that have all been a tremendous part of SmashPad’s growth.

And Finally… The Top 10 (After you click next page)

For those of you who don’t know how our Top 10 works, it’s actually a process that we’re really proud of.

Every person on staff that participates has to write their “Top Games of the Year” listicle, which you’ve probably seen every day since December 19. Each game they’ve selected is awarded a number of points from one to 10, with one point being awarded to their 10th favorite game and 10 points being awarded to their Game of the Year.

The caveats? The game has to be at least a v1.0 released during the calendar year (no Early Access, Alphas, or betas) and it cannot be a same-generation port (no Indiana Jones and the Great Circle). Remakes, remasters, and DLC are totally fair game as long as they’re new releases for the year.

On top of that, we understand that not everybody has the capacity to play at least 10 great games a year. That said, some of our staff provided a Top Five or even a Top Seven instead of a Top 10. That’s fine, except that their point totals get re-weighted. For example, anybody with a Top Five instead of a Top 10 saw their point totals halved just because it wouldn’t be fair to punish people that probably played more games that year.

All that being said, if you wanted to, you can do the math yourselves to see who won our GOTY before this piece is published. But where’s the fun in that?

Still, enough talking. It’s time for our Top 10 Games of 2025, as chosen by the SmashPad staff!