This summer, the Switch 2 became the fastest-selling console in Nintendo’s history, with 10.36 million units sold in the first four months after launch.

It has been a landmark year for the video games industry, marked by new hardware launches and multi-billion-dollar deals.

Further consolidation followed when a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, alongside Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners and Silver Lake, announced plans to acquire Electronic Arts. The proposed $55 billion private deal, which includes $20 billion in debt financing, would be the largest leveraged buyout in Wall Street history.

Analysts at Omdia said the move could have significant implications for EA. They noted that the key question is whether the Public Investment Fund intends to run its East Asian operations as a “public relations project” or to “extract maximum returns” from the company.

French games developer Ubisoft had hoped to turn its fortunes around this year, but a second delay to the latest entry in its flagship Assassin’s Creed series, Shadows, pushed the release into 2025.

Ubisoft shares rose in March after the company announced the creation of a new games subsidiary with Chinese technology group Tencent, called Vantage Studio. The new developer, which will be partly owned by Tencent, will focus on Ubisoft’s core intellectual property, including Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.

Despite these efforts, Ubisoft’s shares have lost more than half their value since the start of the year and remain more than 90 per cent below their 2021 peak.

By contrast, Take-Two Interactive has continued to see its shares rise through 2025, driven by anticipation for the next Grand Theft Auto title. It has been 12 years since the release of GTA 5 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

However, with little official news on GTA 6 for much of the year, fans speculated about a further delay to 26 May 2026. While that date was considered possible, Take-Two chief executive Strauss Zelnick told CNBC in May that he had “very, very high confidence” in meeting the planned schedule. In November, the game was delayed again to 19 November 2026, following news related to a stake in Take-Two.

The title is set to launch late in the lifecycle of Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and S, more than six years after both consoles were released. As attention shifts towards the next generation of hardware, both brands have adjusted their console strategies.

A shift in console strategy

Xbox has moved away from exclusives, bringing titles such as Indiana Jones and Forza Horizon to the PlayStation 5, while PlayStation has continued to experiment with releasing more games on PC.

Zelnick has argued that these changing tactics will make the games industry more open. Asked whether consoles would still matter over the next five to ten years, he said they would remain relevant, with hardware increasingly resembling personal computers because “businesses are opening up rather than closing”.

“But if you define a console as a feature, not a system, the idea of a very rich game that you engage with for hours, played on a large screen, is never going away,” he told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in November.

According to George Jijiashvili, senior games analyst at Omdia, consoles still play a major role in the market. He told CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe that hardware remains “the right place for premium gaming”.

Omdia data shows that consoles are the second-largest category for total consumer spending. Mobile gaming accounts for 60 per cent, consoles for 23 per cent, and PC gaming for 16 per cent.

While many publishers have largely abandoned exclusives, Nintendo has stayed the course. The company has released several exclusive titles for the Switch 2, including an open-world reimagining of Mario Kart and a brand-new Donkey Kong game.

This summer, the Switch 2 became the fastest-selling console of all time, with 10.36 million units sold in its first four months on the market.

Not everyone is convinced by Nintendo’s approach. Christopher Dring, founder and editor-in-chief of The Game Business, told CNBC’s Built for Billions in November that Nintendo faces a challenge in keeping up with demand for its systems.

“Unlike PlayStation, Xbox and other platforms, people buy Nintendo hardware for Nintendo games,” he said. “That means if they do not have a game ready, they cannot rely on other developers to fill the gap.”