Your faves clockwise from top left: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Split Fiction, Death Stranding 2 and ARC Raiders. Your faves clockwise from top left: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Split Fiction, Death Stranding 2 and ARC Raiders. Once again, we are approaching the cherished time of year between Christmas and New Year when we might actually have the time to play some video games. I hope Santa brought you something new to play, instead of taking one look at all the unplayed games in your Steam library and putting you straight on the naughty list. Over the past few weeks you have been sending in your favourite games of the year.

Guillaume Broche collects the award for game of the year at 2025's The Game awards. Guillaume Broche collects the award for game of the year at 2025's The Game awards. Alien: Rogue Incursion Arken Age Ghost Town Marvel's Deadpool VR The Midnight Walk - WINNER

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leads the pack at this year's Game Awards with 12 nominations. The critically acclaimed role-playing game (RPG) is up for Game of the Year, as well as three entries in the best performance category. Other contenders for the top game prize this year are Death Stranding 2, Nintendo platformer Donkey Kong Bananza, indie games Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades 2, and medieval adventure Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. They will all compete at the event - the world's most-watched ceremony celebrating video games - on 11 December in Los Angeles, California. Organisers say there were 154 million livestreams in 2024, when platformer Astro Bot was named Game of the Year. What are the Game Awards?

I am 85 hours into Death Stranding 2, an apocalyptic nightmare about Earth becoming infected with death monsters, and I've realised that I'm playing it as a cosy game. For hours at a time, I trundle along the photorealistic landscapes in my pick-up truck, delivering parcels to isolated communities and building new roads. The only reason I complete the main story missions is to open new areas of the map so that I can meet new people and build more roads. I find it blissfully enjoyable. Of course, I am far from alone in playing video games this way.

Amazon delivery can be tough, unglamorous work. Workers must often reckon with complicated geography, demanding bosses, ever more biblical weather, and schedules that force time-conscious drivers to urinate in bottles. Surprising, then, that this is effectively the role in which one of the year's most anticipated video games casts the player. In Death Stranding 2, you arrange packages into swaying towers on your back, nudge the controller's left- and right-shoulder buttons to keep your weight balanced as you trip down rocky hills, and incur financial penalties for scuffing the merchandise if you take a tumble. The premise is a long trek from the super-soldier games, such as Call of Duty and Helldivers, that dominate the sales charts--even if you must occasionally battle the odd spectral marauder from a parallel dimension to clear the way to the next address on your delivery sheet.

Hideo Kojima – the acclaimed video game director who helmed the stealth-action Metal Gear series for decades before founding his own company to make Death Stranding, a supernatural post-apocalyptic delivery game this publication described as "2019's most interesting blockbuster" – is still starstruck, or perhaps awestruck. "George [Miller] is my sensei, my God," he proclaims gleefully. Kojima is visiting Australia for a sold-out chat with Miller, the creator of the Mad Max film franchise, at the Sydney film festival. The two struck up an unlikely but fierce friendship nearly a decade ago, and Kojima says that, as a teenager, the first two Mad Max films inspired him to become a movie director and thus, eventually, a video game maker. At the panel later, Miller is equally effusive, calling Kojima "almost my brother"; the Australian even lent his appearance to a major character in Kojima's latest game, Death Stranding 2. It's actually because of Miller that much of this latest game is set in a heavily fictionalised version of Australia, Kojima jokes.

The Justice Department said in a filing that Google will have to break up its network of myriad, overlapping businesses and services, upholding the previous administration's proposal. The DOJ reiterated Google will have to sell the Chrome browser -- saying, last year, that selling off Chrome "will permanently stop Google's control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet." Google is likely to file its own alternate remedies, of course. In a December filing, the company said the Justice Department's original remedies went "overboard" and reflected an "interventionist agenda." But Google is huge, and the DOJ is trying to grasp how its parts intermingle and make it less monopolistic.

During my three-decade career as a games journalist I have written a lot of "most anticipated games of the year" articles, and they nearly always have a familiar theme: "Well, the lineup is dominated by sequels (yawn), but at least there are one or two original titles to look forward to!" From today's vantage point that ennui over the predictability of the games industry looks incredibly quaint. We didn't know how good we had it. The past five years have seen seismic shifts in the mainstream industry, mostly connected to the irresistible rise of "live service" games such as Fortnite, GTA Online and Genshin Impact, which survive over multiple years through voracious subscription models. The biggest are insanely profitable: since its launch in 2017, Fortnite is estimated to have earned 20bn ( 15.7bn), maintaining 500 million player accounts into its sixth year. GTA Online still makes an estimated 500m a year ( 399m), more than a decade after its initial release.