Gaming in 2022: A year in review

People trying out different games at The Arena, Comic-Con, Bengaluru

The year 2022 was a weird year for gaming. The industry continued to feel the lingering effects of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic with slower hardware sales and major delays for upcoming AAA games. Here is a look at some of the gaming highlights of 2022.

Unfortunately, major AAA releases continued the trend of messy launches with games like Calisto Protocol or Gotham Knights.

The year began with the dullest of thuds in Babylon's Fall, a half-baked unfinished co-op experience that showed Square Enix has learned nothing from its previous live service disasters. What hurt even more is that it was developed by industry darlings Platinum Games.

Electronic Arts continued to release yearly installments in the FIFA franchise, and like every year, it was mocked but still sold in the millions. Thankfully, EA no longer holds the license to FIFA anymore.

Unfortunately, EA still retains the rights for Madden and Madden 23 was every bit as creatively bankrupt and buggy as it ever was. People still keep buying it for some reason, so it doesn't look like EA is going to mend its ways anytime soon.

Activision Blizzard's Overwatch 2 had a lot of hype surrounding it when it launched in October, then players found out that barely anything had changed from the first game to this one. To make matters worse was one of the greediest implementations of a cash shop in a game. There were bugs and glitches galore as well.

One of the year's biggest misfires was Saints Row. Volition took an established franchise, ripped out everything that was good about it, filled the story with cringeworthy characters and presented players with a buggy, unoptimized launch on release date. The cherry on top? Being openly hostile toward your fans on twitter. What a way to kill the franchise.

While Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II continued to break sales records, Activision Blizzard's free-to-play battle royale did not get the same kind of love. It is a still in buggy state.

Then Calisto Protocol came out broken on PC, and in between the poor performance and people complaining about the game being generic, it was absolutely raked over the coals. The tragedy is it's actually not a bad game, it's quite good but most people will never find that out.

Gotham Knights was released with game breaking bugs and glitches up the wazoo but the fact that it still wasn't as bad as other AAA releases, show you how low the standards have fallen.

Microsoft made headlines at the beginning of the year when they announced they would buy Activision Blizzard for close to $69 billion, making it one of the biggest purchases in the industry.

Since then, however, it has been slippery slope. Sony has been hellbent on making sure the purchase doesn't go through. It even refused deals with Microsoft.

The EU and US FTC have been making Microsoft's life miserable as well with thorough investigations. The entire complaint seems to be rooted with Call of Duty, one of the biggest franchises in gaming.

Sony, EU and US FTC allege that Microsoft will stifle the competition and make Call of Duty exclusive to their platforms. Microsoft has numerous times reiterated it has no plans of doing so.

It even signed a multi-year deal with Nintendo to bring the games to their platforms. PC Marketplace Steam also appears to be on their side.

Sony's allegations completely fall apart, the minute you realize that they are the ones who are known for PlayStation exclusives in the first place, and have routinely paid to keep games exclusive to their platform to prevent competition from getting their hands on it for a few years.

Either way, the deal now lies in the hands of the anti-trust watchdogs, and it will be interesting to see what happens now.

Sony completely revamped its PlayStation Plus offering this year by introducing new tiers - PlayStation Plus, PlayStation Plus Extra, PlayStation Plus Deluxe and PlayStation Plus Essential.

The idea behind the revamp was to compete with Xbox Game Pass, which has now grown to a massive 25 million subscribers. The Game Pass allows players to enjoy a large selection of games on both PC and console.

The Netflix for games model allows players to enjoy games for a low entry fee, while providing publishers an opportune for some up front cash and boosting player numbers in their games.

Along with Ubisoft's Ubisoft+, Humble Choice and EA Play, players now have a swathe of options to choose from. The one blemish is Google shutting down Stadia.

Gaming portables had a great year in 2022. The Nintendo Switch continued to sell well, and we finally saw companies vying for Nintendo's spot with their own devices.

The most promising of these was Valve Software's Steam Deck. Steam Deck is literally a mini-PC, capable of playing almost any PC game in the Steam Store while on the go.

The hardware is great as well, with a custom AMD CPU/GPU module paired with up to 16GB of RAM and NVMe storage. It was loved so much that Valve struggled to keep it in stock throughout the year.

According to a report from Business Standard, Indian gaming was worth $2.6 billion in FY 2022, and is forecasted to hit $8.6 billion by 2027.

With impressive numbers like that, the Indian government was bound to sit-up and take notice. One of the biggest wins for the Indian gaming market happened late in the year but it was an important one.

Under Indian President Droupadi Murmu's orders, eSports was finally given the recognition as a sport. The new order asks the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Sports Ministry to integrate eSports as part of an multi-sports event.