2025 promises to be a monumental year for gaming. It’s a year in which we’ll see big releases, big updates, and big news, all of which promise to leave a lasting mark on the gaming landscape that will be seen for years to come.
It’s only March and we’ve seen plenty of big news already. Last month, it was announced that Football Manager 25, the latest installment in the immensely popular simulation game, was cancelled due to delays in its development.
This rare decision stems from learning from lessons endured by other developers who pushed out games before they were ready and were fiercely criticised for it. Sports Interactive, Football Manager’s creator has likely calculated that it’s better to cancel a game and forego the revenue of than it is to tarnish their brand’s reputation with a sub-par release.
Fans were mostly accepting of this news, with many online comments saying they would prefer smaller updates than trying to push for massive upgrades each year. Some also joked that more husbands would avoid divorces this year than would have been the case of the game being released. The success of this is likely to encourage other publishers to take a similar approach, choosing delay over a disastrous launch.
So while we know one game players won’t be enjoying in 2025, let’s take a look at the titles that promise to be hot this year.
Grand Theft Auto VI
Grand Theft Auto VI is another game that proves that delay is better than rushing to market with a sub-standard release. Fans of the GTA series have been waiting nearly 12 years for a new game and Rockstar Games has remained very tight-lipped about this latest installment.
Following a trailer release in December 2023, almost nothing new has been said or seen from the company since. The only thing we have seen from an official source is that the release of GTA VI is still scheduled for the autumn of 2025.
Almost everything else is still unknown, though leaks are slowly giving us a clearer picture of what the game could look like.
Regardless, there are few safer bets than GTA VI being a massive success. 12 years of work, a flawless track record of creating smash hits, and a self-fueling hype train will mean this game will be setting new sales records from the moment copies hit shelves.
Papa Paolo’s Pizzeria Mega Multiplier
Online casinos have enjoyed explosive growth over the last decade thanks to a combination of technology making it easier for players to access their services and a competitive market forcing operators to innovate.
One of the most visible forms of this innovation has been in the form of slots, with popular brands like PokerStars Casino creating their own unique and exclusive games that help to attract new players.
One of these exclusive slots is Papa Paolo’s Pizzeria Mega Multiplier, an Italian-themed slot game with six reels, 2,000 paylines, and a range of bonus features.
Its reels are adorned with all of Papa Paolo’s pizza-making paraphernalia, including kitchen utensils and pizza boxes. These reels are all contained within the chef’s pizza oven, with the flames occasionally rising from the bottom to turn up the heat.
EA Sports FC 26
Like clockwork, Electronic Arts has been pumping out football games for over three decades. For almost all of that time, the company has been branding them as FIFA, until the two entities decided to part ways.
That pushed EA to go alone, rebranding its game as EA Sports FC, while retaining the same licenses, features, and game modes.
At the time, EA promised it would use this as an opportunity to innovate more to create a more immersive football gaming experience for players. However, EA Sports FC 25 failed to live up to this promise and resulted in a decline in sales of as much as 25%. This made a lot of headlines earlier this year, with outlets reporting the game sold 300,000 fewer copies in the UK alone in 2024 compared to the same period in 2023. Despite that, EA Sports FC 25 still stopped the charts in Britain, outselling Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Hogwarts Legacy, and Grand Theft Auto V.
