Roblox, James Bond and a billion-dollar multiplayer – here are the most-read gaming stories of 2025 | games

WWith the best games of the year (yours and ours), I’d like to highlight some of the work we’ve done in covering them. Reviewing the best-performing articles we published in 2025, I see a picture of a mixed year: lots of great works and games that captured the imagination and the world’s attention, but also growing anxiety about their place in the real world, and the political conditions they reflect. And a lot of (justified) anxiety about Roblox.

But first: I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who reads this newsletter and the rest of our work at The Guardian. If you enjoy our coverage, consider supporting us to do more of it – either with a recurring or one-time contribution. Without your support, none of the great journalism we produce would be possible. Thank you for being with us in 2025, and I hope you’ll still be around to watch me slowly lose my mind as I work overtime in the lead up to Grand Theft Auto 6’s November 2026 release (finally).

In no particular order, here are the most-read featured articles of the year.

The Guardian covered Roblox a lot in 2025, mostly from a child safety perspective. As Sarah Martin finds out in this article, it’s incredibly easy to get into inappropriate situations and conversations on this free-to-play gaming platform, which has more than 150 million daily users (most of whom are kids). I’m not a fan of Roblox and don’t let my kids play it, but if your kids are happy with it and you don’t want to ban the game completely, I’d recommend making sure it’s moderated where possible and that the parental controls are off.

For some reason, this tale of my struggles with Baby Steps seems to speak to a lot of people. I felt somewhat vindicated for having spent over 12 hours of my life driving a useless person up a hill.

Our gaming correspondent, Keith Stewart, goes down one of his favorite rabbit holes here, and comes up with a wonderfully researched tribute to one of Sega’s most underrated consoles. Revisionist history often crowns the NES as the winner of the 1980s console wars, but this was only true in Japan and the United States – in Europe, home computers and the Sega Master System reigned supreme.

I have to admit this was very satisfying to write. After boasting about his gaming prowess on X, Elon Musk has been revealed to have cheated in some baffling attempts to usurp gamer credibility. As the year went on, this proved to be just one of many embarrassing antics of the world’s richest man.

Games have a lot of economic and cultural power. It was the original site of the modern online culture wars, during Gamergate, and now the Trump administration isn’t shy about using gaming imagery to mobilize its base. This reporting by Alyssa Mercanti is a story about how images of Pokémon and Halo were used for recruitment to ICE, but it’s also a story about where gaming now stands in the broader political context of our time.

Who needs Grand Theft Auto: The next game Guardian readers are most interested in in 2026 is 007 First Light. Maybe because the future of the films was still up in the air when it was announced, or maybe because the love for GoldenEye 007 still runs deep. Joshua Rivera interviews the people at IO Interactive who convinced Eon Productions to let them win James Bond.

Menu features get a bad reputation but this is a good, thoughtful example of the form, in my (biased) opinion, from Keith Stewart and Christian Donlan. We remember the places we step into in games as if they were real, and some of these virtual mansions look like childhood homes. (We must be so lucky to have grown up in Croft Manor.)

I know that many Pushing Buttons readers are gamers of a certain type. Adrienne Matei talks to some of Twitch’s oldest video game streamers (they like MechanicalGramma a lot) to find out why half of people over 60 play video games, and the potential benefits of doing so.

This story has been running in the Guardian’s games pages for years, ever since Keith wrote what he thought would be a very niche article questioning why some people play games upside down. Finally, after that article inspired an actual scientific study, we have the answer.

I’ve been interested in the spaceship game Star Citizen for a long time, mostly because I wondered where the hundreds of millions of pounds it raised in funding actually went. (It’s been “in development” since 2012 and its creators aren’t pretending it’s by any means close to being finished.) Oliver Holmes talks to players to find out why they’ve invested thousands in this sci-fi dream. Since publishing this article, Star Citizen’s revenue has risen to $924,266,846, and it now has six million players.

What are you playing?

This week I will play Guitar hero and Rock bandBecause I have young children and I can’t go out to Hogmanay. So instead I’m going to dig all the old plastic tools out of the attic and bring the party to myself. I can’t insist that you do anything so impractical – the last time I tried it, I got the dreaded red ring of death on my trusty old Xbox 360, and the whole plan fell apart – but if I… He does I forgot some sing star Microphones and an old PlayStation 2 or 3 hidden away, these are your PSA’s that all still work, and are actually just as fun as they were in 2008. Happy New Year!

Available on: 2010 controller of your choice
Estimated playing time: Twenty years and counting

What to click on

Question block

There’s no reader question this week since we’re all still on vacation, but to kick off 2026, I’d like to invite you to write a few sentences about your most anticipated game(s) for next year. Simply hit reply to this newsletter or email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com, and your choices could appear in the January issue of the newsletter.