Astro Bot is the game of the year 2024. What now?

It’s not a December without the Game Awards, Geoff Keighley’s annual trailer presentation, and the occasional awards ceremony celebrating the biggest games of the year. More than in previous years, this year’s nominees for the Best Game of the Year award were a diverse mix of heavyweights like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth And Metaphor: ReFantazio and surprise my darlings Balatro And Black Myth Wukong. And the winner turned out to be…AstroBot, the PlayStation 5 exclusive platformer from Team Asobi.

We’ve had The Game Awards for a decade now, and it’s a bit of a guy when it comes to its GOTY picks: previous games like Witcher 3, God of War 2018 reboot, and Baldur’s Gate 3 were they fantasy or mature titles, and Astrobot is a family-friendly game in which a cute robot with a big head explores worlds and makes friends with cute Funko versions of PlayStation characters. It’s a very good match, but his victory was really surprising, especially when Balatro had conquered the world for months and Metaphor was also taking off in its own way. Now that the dust has settled, the question on people’s minds is what it means for a platform game to win a prestigious award at what is a major mainstream awards ceremony for the medium.

The immediate next step will almost surely be a sequel of some sort; The Asobi team is currently offering free post-launch tiers for AstroBot, which sold 1.5 million copies last November. There’s no doubt that Sony is going to let Asobi cook, and whenever the next game is revealed, I hope the Astro The series takes a first step towards constructing its own identity. Both Bot and its predecessor Astro’s playroom (which came pre-installed on launch PS5s) were sightseeing tours of PlayStation’s past. It’s a lot of fun seeing tiny, big-headed versions of childhood mascots, but the constant winking can wear thin pretty quickly and highlights how little else the series has to offer the beyond the credentials and its superb gameplay mechanics. An argument can be made that it doesn’t need anything more, but having a unique personality is what has helped other platform games last. Of the big three publishers, Nintendo is really the only one to be fully aware of this, and that’s why Mario can maintain such general consistency, even when the character (and Luigi) are platforming while bouncing between a dozen or so games. other genres at some point. So if Sony wants its own Mario, that will mean finding out who Astro is beyond a blank slate wearing the skin of his old series.

Speaking of franchises, one of the other big surprises from The Game Awards came from Capcom, who revealed that it was developing new games for the Okami And Onimusha franchise. THE resident Evil The studio has been on a very strong streak of releases lately and recently said the two projects are part of a larger effort to revitalize previously shelved series. You have to imagine Sony is looking at this alongside AstrobotMany PlayStation franchises also get some love in this game, and fans have been hoping for years that some of them would be dusted off. Many also hoped for the collapse of Concord alongside Astro The success prompted Sony to focus on creating smaller, more diverse games instead of putting its eggs in the triple-A cinematic basket. This has been a problem within the industry since years, especially for PlayStation first-party teams, and failure to recognize this problem earlier led to over 1,000 developers being laid off this year and several projects being canceled.

It’s a shame that PlayStation’s devotion to blockbusters has led to the erosion of the double-A genre, as that’s where many of their older franchises would likely perform best these days. (See also: Ubisoft is pretty good Prince of Persia: Lost Crown from the beginning of this year.) Lately I’ve been playing again Sly 2: Band of Thieves after its port to PS5, and doing it for the first time Resistance 2 playback via cloud streaming. Both feel perfectly suited to their times, and it’s easy to imagine that their respective series could have a place in the current PlayStation pantheon if they were just allowed to do so. be without massive expectations being imposed on them. Sneaky could easily fill the niche of stylish, personality-filled games following last year’s launch. Rush towards Hi-Fi, And Resistance Or Kill zone could be a good system-exclusive shooter – last year Sony tried to stop Microsoft from buying Activision Blizzard by arguing that Call of Duty was too valuable and no other shooter could hope to surpass it. Ideally, neither should aim for such lofty heights, but as PlayStation’s response to Halo, which is itself about to undergo a second or third redesign, would be appreciated. As it stands, any hope of non-Nintendo mid-sized games with brand recognition now sort of rests on Astro’s tiny, delicate shoulders.

The Asobi team should not use Astrobot to fix everything that’s wrong with triple-A games overnight, he just has the unfortunate luck of arriving as the industry’s reckoning with several years of calculated risks not paying off as expected. Making an industry healthier will take time, and its impact will be felt sooner or later, even if it’s just its own sequel or an indie game that hopes to capture some of its unbridled, non-corporate spirit .

Or failing that, PlayStation could just go back on remasters and remakes and simply please bringing more of its older first-party titles to PC or natively to PlayStation 5.

Want more io9 news? Find out when to expect the latest releases from Marvel, Star Wars and Star Trek, what’s next for the DC Universe in film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.