As we close out the eventful year 2024, we look ahead to a games release calendar that is already teeming with excellent titles. Several of the games launching in 2025 have already cultivated large fanbases and media interest, building up anticipation for them ahead of their launch. Following on from Dean’s own most-anticipated games list, the games on this list are most likely to top the sales charts in the coming year.

2025’s titles are entering into an unusual market. Many publishers would have said at the beginning of 2024 that live-service titles are the way of the market, but the market very firmly pushed back on many (not all, but many) of the newly launched titles on offer. Many of them either shut down or their publishers announced an end to fresh content after only a brief time on the market, including Concord, Foamstars, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and XDefiant.

The titles for the upcoming year, on the other hand, feature co-op titles and single-player narrative games from some of the industry’s biggest and most well-regarded studios. Here are the games that seem like they’re most likely to lead in sales next year, to say nothing of critical acclaim.

Grand Theft Auto VI

Rockstar’s next game has had a doozy of a launch journey. Multiple details about the game have leaked at various points in development, culminating in a hacker releasing footage of the game mid-development in 2022. The launch of the trailer was similarly bamboozled by another leaker dropping it early, though this doesn’t seem to have dampened anyone’s enthusiasm for the game.

GTA V still holds steady as one of the best-selling games of all time, and all indications show that GTA VI will be a worthy successor and is likely to put up good sales numbers. At present, GTA VI is still planned for a launch in the fall 2025 release window, and Take-Two and Rockstar appear to be ardently committed to this timeline. Other games are allegedly holding back on confirming fall release dates in order to not conflict with GTA VI.

Elden Ring: Nightreign

Elden Ring continues to be one of the industry’s bestsellers a year after its launch, bolstered by a combination of much-anticipated expansion launch, fans of developer FromSoftware and solid gameplay that invites replay. Now FromSoft is keeping the IP going with a new spin-off, Nightreign. The game has a network test early in 2025, with the full title launching sometime later in the year.

This new title is a co-op ARPG with procedurally generated areas, its gameplay faster-paced than the original Elden Ring. It features characters for players to pick and customize, rather than building one of their own from scratch. While it may not have quite the impact on the market that Elden Ring had when it launched (albeit the latter had years of uncertain marketing to build anticipation), it could see strong early sales based on name recognition and gamers’ faith in FromSoft to deliver a quality product.

Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra

With the recent success of titles like Marvel Snap, Marvel Rivals and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, video games based on Marvel franchises appear to be doing well with gamers. The combination of recognizable characters and solid, accessible gameplay has made for some of the most popular titles of the last few years. In 2025, Skydance Media is offering its own take on this winning formula with Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra.

Marvel 1943 is a story-based action-adventure game that follows Captain America and Black Panther, alongside Howling Commando Gabe Jones and Wakandan spy Nanali, on a mission during World War 2. One of the game’s writers is industry veteran Amy Hennig, best known for her work on the Uncharted series. At present, the game has a 2025 release window.

Monster Hunter Wilds

The Monster Hunter series has been around for 20 years, and has always sold reasonably well. However, with the launch of Monster Hunter World in 2018, the franchise really took off, with the game selling over 25 million units as of March 2024 (including the Iceborne addition). Follow-up title Monster Hunter Rise sold 15 million units as of the same time, with franchise as a whole selling over 100 million units.

Monster Hunter Wilds appears poised to continue that trend, offering a beautiful and feature-rich follow-up on World. The new game is set in the Forbidden Lands, where the player must contend with a new menagerie of monsters, using a new bird-like mount to traverse the massive open-world. The game launches for PC and consoles on February 28.

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet

Naughty Dog is a developer that has consistently launched popular, well-received titles for years. The Uncharted series is one of the most beloved in the industry, and The Last of Us is considered one of the best games ever made and has been adapted into an Emmy Award-winning TV show. So a new game — indeed, a new IP — from Naughty Dog is enough to catch the eye, especially given that The Last of Us’s Neil Druckmann is returning as creative director.

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is sci-fi action-adventure game following the adventures of a bounty hunter as they attempt to track down a target on a remote planet from which no one has ever returned. The footage shown so far shows said bounty hunter, Jordan, fighting off robots. This is the only game on this list without a confirmed 2025 launch window, however Naughty Dog does say that it’s been working on the game since 2020.

Avowed

Avowed was originally supposed to launch in 2024, but developer Obsidian and publisher Xbox Game Studios delayed it by three months to “give players’ backlogs some breathing room” (while simultaneously showing the logos of all the games releasing in late 2024 with which Avowed’s original launch date might conflict). Given that the title is a very large ARPG, it’s understandable that the publishers wanted to give it the best chance at success — though its new date of February 18 does put it closer to Monster Hunter Wilds.

Obsidian’s previous titles include Peabody Award-winning Pentiment (my favorite game of 2022), the Pillars of Eternity series, cult classic Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: The Stick of Truth and The Outer Worlds. All of these titles have had critical acclaim and sales success, with The Outer Worlds in particular selling 4 million units by its second anniversary. Given the bona fides of its developer, Avowed looks like it could do well at the market despite the competition.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2

Warhorse Studio’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a dark horse hit of 2018, offering an RPG set in a (somewhat) historically accurate setting of 15th-century Bohemia. The sequel, Deliverance 2, follows the continuing story of Henry, a blacksmith’s son-turned-major political player, as players make choices that will influence his life’s direction. The new game, as with the original, also features a survival system that requires Henry to regularly eat and sleep.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance was originally funded by a Kickstarter campaign in 2014, with Warhorse signing a publishing deal with Deep Silver in 2016. Warhorse confirmed at the beginning of November this year that the original game had sold over 8 million copies. Creative director Daniel Vavra said the game’s reveal that Deliverance 2 is the game that Warhorse wished to make, but couldn’t due to lack of resources. It launches on February 4.

Split Fiction

Josef Fares officially revealed his newest game at The Game Awards: Split Fiction, an action-adventure game that is, like Hazelight’s previous title, It Takes Two, made with splitscreen co-op in mind. Players control Zoe and Mio, two authors trapped in their own and each other’s stories, navigating both platforming challenges and genre differences at the same time. The game launches on March 6.

While Hazelight has only put out two previous games, A Way Out and the aforementioned It Takes Two, both games did quite well at sales. It Takes Two, in particular, has sold over 20 million units and won Game of the Year at the 2021 Game Awards and the 25th D.I.C.E. Awards. Like its predecessors, Split Fiction launches with a “Friend Pass,” meaning that only one of a pair of co-op partners needs to own the game in order to play it.

Sid Meier’s Civilization 7

The Civilization series is one of gaming’s stalwarts, having existed since the early 90s and sold over 70 million units to date. 2016’s Civilization VI sold one million units within the first two weeks of its launch. Now Firaxis Games and 2K are following up on the series with the next installment, the appropriately named Civilization VII, which launches on February 11.

According to Firaxis, Civilization VII will be the largest game in the series to date, and also innovates on the leader system by expanding the roster (to include scientific and philosophical leaders alongside military leaders) while also allowing players to select leaders for each age of their civilization. The eras have been simplified to Antiquity, Exploration and Modern. Civilization VII will also feature Gwendoline Christie as its narrator.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A

Nintendo’s 2025 titles are in a bit of an unusual situation — while the company has not itself confirmed it, the smart money is on the reveal of the Switch successor sometime early in the year. That means that all Nintendo games thus far announced could launch on the “Switch 2” as well as the Switch. Pokémon Legends: Z-A is launching on “Nintendo Switch systems” in 2025, according to Game Freak.

This series is a consistently good seller for Nintendo, and predecessor Legends: Arceus sold almost 15 million units over the course of a year. At present, we don’t know much about Z-A except that it’s set in Lumiose City, the setting of Pokémon X & Y.

Other anticipated titles

2025 already has a packed release calendar, so the above titles are far from the only ones that could take the top spot on a best-seller list. Below is a list of all of the other major releases currently schedule for a 2025 release window:

• Donkey Kong Country Returns HD (Jan 16)
• Dynasty Warriors: Origins (Jan 17)
• Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. (Jan 28)
• Assassin’s Creed Shadows (Feb 14)
• Date Everything! (Feb 14)
• Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 1 (Feb 18)
• Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii (Feb 21)
• Two Point Museum (Mar 4)
• FragPunk (Mar 6)
• Lost Records: Bloom & Rage Tape 2 (Mar 18)
• Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game (Mar 25)
• Atomfall (Mar 27)
• Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves (Apr 24)
• 2XKO
• The Alters
• ARC Raiders
• Borderlands 4
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Crimson Desert
• The Dark Pictures Anthology: Directive 8020
• Death Stranding 2: On The Beach
• Doom: The Dark Ages
• Dune: Awakening
• Dying Light: The Beast
• Fable
• FBC: Firebreak
• Ghost of Yōtei
• GreedFall 2: The Dying World
• John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando
• Killing Floor 3
• Kingmakers
• The Legend of Baboo
• Little Nightmares III
• Mafia: The Old Country
• Metroid Prime 4: Beyond
• The Outer Worlds 2
• Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero
• Professor Layton and the New World of Steam
• The Sinking City 2
• Slay the Spire 2
• Sonic Rumble
• South of Midnight
• Splitgate 2
• Tron: Catalyst
• Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2
• Virtua Fighter title
• Witchfire