Xbox is buying Activision Blizzard.

Game industry predictions for 2024 | The DeanBeat

Predictions are foolish to make and yet the temptation to rush back into the breach is always a pull for me. The future is terrifying the more unknown it is, and so I and many other prognosticators try to see a pattern in the darkness ahead. All I can say once again is that I hope you are well and that we’ll all have a better year in 2024 than we had in 2023. This year was marked by 11,000 layoffs that I didn’t expect, given the resilience of gaming during tough economic times.

As such, it was a pretty unpredictable year. As I learned in the pandemic, I now think about predictions with both a sense of hope and a sense of dread. The compass seems broken when it comes to finding that unending paradise for the gaming industry.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.