With Summer Game Fest upon us, it’s helpful to take a look back at last year’s presentation for a progress report. There were a ton of games announced at last year’s event; many of them big deals, many of them very much not. Some games we’re still waiting on while others flamed out as soon as they were released. Here’s some of the biggest announcements from last year’s show, and where those games are at right now.
Resident Evil Requiem
Resident Evil Requiem was the biggest hit to come out of the Summer Game Fest 2025 showcase. Between the continued success of the Monster Hunter franchise and a succession of well-received Resident Evil games, Capcom has been on a tear with its recent AAA releases. That success has allowed them the financial wiggle-room to experiment with quirkier games like Pragmata and Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess.
Last Flag
Seems like every big video game presentation features at least one new live-service shooter that shuts down within weeks of its launch. Highguard famously met this fate after being revealed at last year’s Game Awards and Last Flag filled the role for Summer Game Fest 2025. The capture-the-flag 5v5 hero shooter was developed by Night Street Games, a studio co-founded by Imagine Dragons singer Dan Reynolds and his brother Mac. Last Flag was a passion project that they released many, many years too late, long into the live-service fatigue winter. A few weeks after the game’s launch, the development team announced they would wind down future support.
007 First Light
Who knew IO Interactive could make a really great game about an assassin and his fun little gadgets? 007 First Light is the best James Bond game since GoldenEye on the N64, and it’s sold like hotcakes in the week since its release. Amazon now owns the James Bond IP, and comments from Amazon Game Studios boss Jeff Gattis led many to speculate that as a result, IOI wouldn’t get to make any more 007 games, but the company has since put out a statement intended to quell those fears. Hopefully, this means we can look forward to more Hitman-but-make-it-James-Bond in the future.
Arc Raiders
While yes, gamers are kinda tired of live-service multiplayer games, there’s something about the extraction shooter genre that makes it so the typical live-service fatigue does not apply. (See also: Marathon.) Arc Raiders launched in late 2025 to massive hype that hasn’t seemed to wane yet despite asinine comments about generative AI usage from executives at the game’s publisher, Nexon.
Mixtape
Mixtape is an interesting game, one that’s had a much bigger impact on video game discourse than its indie status and modest scope might have led you to expect. On average, people enjoyed the slice-of-life teenage adventure set to the sounds of Devo and Stan Bush. But others thought the game was too obvious nostalgia-bait that presented a very narrow example of the adolescent experience as a universal one. Those opposing opinions, including sillier accusations like Mixtape not being a “real” video game, fueled conversations about the game for weeks on social media.
Deadpool VR
Deadpool VR, a Meta Quest 3 exclusive, was an amusing Summer Game Fest reveal. I remember watching that trailer and trying to pin down who exactly the Temu Ryan Reynolds was that they got to quip into a microphone. Turns out it was Neil Patrick Harris who played Deadpool to exhausting imperfection. Unfortunately, the team at Twisted Pixel didn’t survive long after Deadpool VR‘s launch, though not for the typical reason of a game’s poor performance. Meta closed the studio down earlier this year along with two other studios as a part of its shift to AI technology.
Mina the Hollower
Yacht Club Games’ make or break title, Mina the Hollower is the indie game hit of the summer. A delay pushed the game out from its October 2025 release date into June of this year and that extra time seems to have paid off. The game has sold over 300,000 copies in its first three days, an achievement that developers say will keep Yacht Club Games going without the need to rely on outside investment or resort to layoffs.
MindsEye
Through the 2025 showcase featured games that have since released to very modest or very little fanfare, there were only two really notable failures, and MindsEye was one of them. With a developer team led by former GTA producer Leslie Benzies, MindsEye overpromised and severely underdelivered.
A chaotic development environment may have contributed to MindsEye’s messiness. Former employees have filed a grievance against the company alleging it installed monitoring software on employees’ devices and implemented crunch conditions during and after MindsEye’s launch. However, the game’s executives paint a different picture. Mark Gerhard, CEO of MindsEye developer Build a Rocket Boy, has claimed that the game was sabotaged by internal and external forces; the studio released a special mission for MindsEye that was meant to reveal evidence of the alleged sabotage, but apparently the evidence was unconvincing.
Splitgate 2
1047 Games CEO Ian Proulx probably hoped his hat bearing the MAGA-adjacent slogan Make FPS Great Again would get people talking when he wore it to present Splitgate 2 at SGF 2025. It did, in the worst way, with conversations about the hat completely eclipsing any discussion of the game at all. Once out, Splitgate 2 struggled to retain players and the ones it did have complained of microtransactions and the game’s battle royale mode, which isn’t something you’d expect from someone wanting to MFPSGA. The developers took the game back into beta to work on it, then relaunched it in December with a new name Splitgate: Arena Reloaded.
