The game industry is still living in compressed time. It went through more gyrations and disruptions in a year than it usually does in a generation. The revolution in games is on our doorstep, but several of the big companies trying to start it have failed to execute. They proved that ambition alone isn’t enough to take on the status quo.
But traditional game makers can’t be too smug. We saw the bankruptcy of THQ and the weakening of many of the strongest video game franchises. Social, mobile, and online forces will continue to reshape the business in the coming year, but nobody was free of trouble.
The good news is that the number of gamers continues to soar (past a billion), and, sometime soon, somebody is going to hit a phenomenal home run. That is why that, in spite of some phenomenal crash landings, entrepreneurs and investors are still going big with new game startups. Those startups aren’t raising as much money as they once did, but the entrepreneurs running them still have fire in their bellies.
We’ve gone back through the archives of GamesBeat for the past year and dug up the stories that made the biggest impact. Here’s our list of the biggest game stories of 2012.