When it comes to new horror games, there are times of feast and famine, and this past year we gorged until our bellies bulged and our mouths dripped with gruesome grease. In 2024, we received a rich spread of dark experiences from solo creators, indie teams, AA developers and AAA studios in a vast array of genres and visual styles. There was a fantastic Silent Hill 2 remake and beefy updates to contemporary classics like Phasmophobia, Alan Wake 2 and The Outlast Trials, and there was also a steady cadence of brand-new horror franchises expanding the genre in unexpected ways. First, let's take a moment to celebrate a sampling of the year's fresh horror universes. This is not a comprehensive list of new horror franchises in 2024, but it's a suitable demonstration of how vast and varied the offerings were this year.

Despite the pandemic, it's been a pretty great year for video game hardware. Microsoft launched the Xbox Series X, a powerful obelisk packing a 12-teraflop GPU, and the smaller Series S, which can run games natively at 1440p resolution. Sony, meanwhile, released the PlayStation 5 and a cheaper Digital Edition that doesn't come with a disc drive. Both companies are struggling with stock shortages at the moment and a number of user-reported hardware issues. Still, it's a minor miracle that neither Sony nor Microsoft was forced to delay their next-gen launch.

It's been another great year for robots. We didn't quite figure out how to imbue them with human-level intelligence, but we gave it the old college try and came up with GPT-2 (the text generator so scary it gives Freddy Krueger nightmares) and the AI magic responsible for these adorable robo-cheetahs: Early birds are even cooler. But it's time to let the past go and point our bows toward the future. It's no longer possible to estimate how much the machine learning and AI markets are worth, because the line between what's an AI-based technology and what isn't has become so blurred that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all "AI companies" that also do other stuff. Your local electricity provider uses AI and so does the person who takes those goofy real-estate agent pictures you see on park benches.

Starting with the good news -- as you can see from the chart below, last year, at this time, 82% of VCs were either "very concerned" or "didn't feel compelled to do deals given uncertainty" and that has totally reversed with 62% being optimistic or bullish. Unsurprisingly, with VCs being more optimistic the number of VCs who planned to increased their investment activities doubled in 2017 while the number who planned to do fewer deals went down by nearly 2/3rds. And as VCs get more bullish on the investment environment and pick up the pace of their activities a natural result is the valuations tend to hold up, which bodes will for entrepreneurs raising capital in 2017. As you can see from the chart below, very few VCs are forecasting significant price drops (2%) versus a year ago when a large number were bracing for price drops (30%). We also asked VCs to weigh in on the areas of technology that most interested them in the coming five years and the overwhelming winner was in startups focused on machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI). And as a result of this interest, you can expect an increase of activity in investments in the space in the coming year, whereas many VCs thought AR / VR and Blockchain investments would be more ripe as opportunities in the 3–5 year time horizon. Since the change in government is still fresh on people's minds we asked what VCs thought about the Trump Administration. This was anonymously conducted after the election but a couple of weeks before the inauguration and the data were very clear -- VCs don't like Trump.

Last year, artificial intelligence research made great strides. In the third of three matches in China, an AI program beat the world champion at Go – a fearsomely more complex game than chess while, last March, Carnegie Mellon University's Libratus AI program beat humans at poker for the first time.

Alphabet reported significantly higher revenue for the fourth quarter of 2016 on the back of increased mobile and YouTube video advertising. Revenue in the last three months of the year jumped 22 percent from a year earlier, reaching $26.1 billion, while net income rose 8 percent to $5.3 billion. "2016 was simply a great year for us," said Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Alphabet and Google, in a conference call with analysts. The vast majority of the quarter's revenue, $22.4 billion, came from Google's advertising business, with $3.4 billion coming from other business segments such as hardware sales, the Google Play Store and Google's Cloud services. Google's so-called "other bets," the fancy and fantastical projects such as self-driving cars, Google Fiber and internet from drones, contributed $262 million, up 75 percent.

Some video games just couldn't make the cut in 2016. On the one hand, it was a great year for first-person shooters and PC strategy games. On the other hand, quite a few releases were half-baked, disappointing, or just plain bad. In the below video I discuss my top five video game disappointments for the last year. There are others not mentioned here, like Homefront: The Revolution which probably deserve a spot on the list. But I never had really high hopes for that game.