2025 in AAA: The Year a Debut Studio Beat the Blockbusters
Record launches from Capcom and EA, a brilliant first year for Switch 2, and a Game of the Year from a French team nobody had heard of. Here is how 2025's biggest games scored, sold and surprised.
On December 11, 2025, the most expensive games of the year sat in the audience at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles and watched a role-playing game from a first-time studio in Montpellier collect trophy after trophy. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Game of the Year at The Game Awards, plus eight more prizes. Its nine wins and 13 nominations were both records for the show.
That moment is the perfect summary of 2025 in big-budget games. The blockbusters were huge, several of them broke their own franchise records, and yet the year's defining story came from the edge of the industry. Here is the full picture: what scored highest, what sold fastest, and what stumbled.
The scoreboard: 2025's best-reviewed big games
Critic averages are the fairest way to compare a year, so here are the numbers, using OpenCritic's Top Critic Average unless noted. Among the large-scale releases, the top tier looked like this:
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Nintendo Switch 2 Edition: 94
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: 92
- Donkey Kong Bananza: 91
- Split Fiction: 91
- Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: 90
- Monster Hunter Wilds: 89
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance II: 89
- Ghost of Yotei: 87
Two smaller games also sat at the very top: Supergiant's Hades II (94) and Team Cherry's Hollow Knight: Silksong (91). Both were Game of the Year nominees, a reminder that "AAA" describes a budget, not a ceiling on quality.
The next band, in the mid-80s on Metacritic, included Mario Kart World (86), DOOM: The Dark Ages (85 on PC) and Battlefield 6 (83 on PS5). Assassin's Creed Shadows landed at 81 on PS5. Nintendo's late-year trio came in lower: Kirby Air Riders at 79, and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Pokemon Legends: Z-A both at 78 on Switch 2.
Records on day one
Commercially, 2025 belonged to two franchises that had something to prove.
Capcom's Monster Hunter Wilds arrived on February 28 and sold over 8 million copies in three days, the fastest-selling game in Capcom's history at that point. It passed 10 million by the end of March and peaked at more than 1.38 million concurrent players on Steam. In Japan it sold 601,179 physical copies in its first week, the biggest physical launch for any PS5 game there.
EA's Battlefield 6 launched on October 10 after two open betas, and sold more than 7 million copies in three days, the best start in the series' history. It went on to become the best-selling game of 2025 in the United States and, for the first time ever, a Battlefield outsold that year's Call of Duty. We tell the full shooter story in our Battlefield vs Call of Duty feature.
Smaller publishers had their moments too. Warhorse Studios' Kingdom Come: Deliverance II sold 1 million copies on launch day, broke even that same day, and passed 5 million by February 2026. id Software said DOOM: The Dark Ages reached 3 million players in its first week, its biggest launch ever, helped by a day-one Game Pass release.
PlayStation's prestige year
Sony did not have a big multiplayer hit in 2025, but its two single-player exclusives were among the best-reviewed games of the year.
Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (June 26) took Sam Porter Bridges to Australia, gave him trucks, monorails and more combat, and earned a Famitsu score of 39/40. It collected seven Game Awards nominations, including Game of the Year. Sucker Punch's Ghost of Yotei (October 2) moved the samurai series north to Hokkaido in 1603, swapped Jin Sakai for a new hero named Atsu, and sold about 3.3 million copies in its first month.
The awkward footnote: Sony had the most nominations of any publisher at The Game Awards (19) and went home with none.
Nintendo's launch year
The Nintendo Switch 2 went on sale on June 5, 2025 at $449.99, with Mario Kart World as its headliner. It became the console's defining game: open-world racing, 24-player grids and the elimination mode Knockout Tour. By September 30, 2026, Nintendo had sold 16.48 million copies, by far the best-selling Switch 2 game.
Six weeks later came Donkey Kong Bananza, built by the team behind Super Mario Odyssey. Its smashable voxel worlds earned a 91 and Best Family Game at The Game Awards, and by September 2026 it had sold 5.05 million copies. Pokemon Legends: Z-A (October 16), Kirby Air Riders (November 20) and the long-delayed Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (December 4) filled out the holiday. None matched the first two for reviews, but Pokemon Legends: Z-A sold over 5.8 million in its first week across Switch and Switch 2. Our Switch 2 first-party guide covers the whole line-up.
The year's stumbles
Not every big launch went to plan.
Monster Hunter Wilds sold brilliantly but ran badly on many PCs. Its recent Steam user rating sank to "Overwhelmingly Negative" by July 2025 as players complained about performance. Capcom acknowledged the problem and shipped a major PC update in January 2026, and the story has a happier second act, which we cover in our Monster Hunter Wilds comeback story.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 (November 14) had the toughest year. It scored 66 on Metacritic for PS5, was review-bombed by players to a user score as low as 1.5, and finished fifth in the US annual sales chart, Call of Duty's lowest year-end ranking since 2008. Criticism of generative-AI art in the game added to the noise.
Assassin's Creed Shadows was a commercial success, with more than 5 million players by July 2025, but its road was rough. It was delayed twice, and Ubisoft changed shrine and temple content after complaints in Japan.
Why it matters
2025 showed two things at once. Blockbusters are not dying: Capcom, EA and Nintendo all set records with expensive, polished games. But players and critics have stopped equating price with prestige. A debut studio won the biggest award in the business, and two indie action games scored as high as anything from the giants.
WGC's take: the most interesting AAA games of 2025 were the ones that took a risk inside a big budget, such as Kojima's strange delivery epic, Warhorse's 2.2-million-word history lesson and Nintendo's destructible Donkey Kong. The safest sequels drew the harshest reactions.
By the numbers
- 9: Game Awards won by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a record
- 8 million: Monster Hunter Wilds sales in three days
- 7 million: Battlefield 6 sales in three days
- 16.48 million: Mario Kart World copies sold by September 30, 2026
- 171 million: viewers of The Game Awards 2025
- 0: Game Awards won by Sony, despite a leading 19 nominations
What to play next
If you missed the year, start with the games that have aged best. Clair Obscur and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II both have complete editions or full expansions now. Death Stranding 2 reached PC on March 19, 2026, so you no longer need a PS5. Monster Hunter Wilds is in much better shape than at launch, and a Switch 2 version arrives on December 4, 2026. And if you own a Switch 2, Donkey Kong Bananza is the purest fun of the year. For what came next, read our 2026 AAA year so far.