Hottest Mess 2025: Community Poll WINNERS

How do you summarize 2025? A quick scan of guest and user Game of the Year lists suggests it might not have been the best year to generally exist on planet Earth. In the United States (trust me, we will get to those fuckers shortly), things felt particularly bleak for a wide variety of reasons. The video games themselves were, on the whole, excellent escapism in the same vein of 2017’s releases. But we’re not here to talk about excellence, as this article’s title suggests. 

In November of last year, prior to the site freeze, I posted a community poll with a staggering 36 candidates, plus a write-in option. Even more surprisingly, half of those candidates didn’t receive a single vote, even as all participants were encouraged to vote for 3 nominees. It was an absolutely dominant performance by the eventual champion, which has certainly graced the Hottest Mess recap in years past. The first runner-up is certainly no slouch, gathering the votes of nearly half the participants. Things got very murky for second runner-up, with a disastrous video game launch sneaking by the others (presumably in a spaghetti-ed out fashion). And while I can no longer access the poll’s comments section, there was strong support for the write-in winner (which was likely responsible for all of the 9% Other votes in the poll). Lastly, I selected the fourth-place finisher as our second at-large winner, as I felt their brand of Mess accurately reflected the year 2025’s high-pressure shit-spray.

The final list of candidates can be found here, with the winners of 2024 and 2023 also available for your perusal.

Community Winner - Microsoft (68% of participants included one vote)

(Image Credit: CNET)

It’s hard to imagine a worse year for the Xbox brand than the one it just had. To really obtain the scope of their drain spiraling, we zoomed out to their parent corporation calling the shots. PC Gamer summarized 2025 as “Microsoft’s Year of Shame”, which feels like an understatement. Supplementing that excellent writeup, Microsoft’s insane demand for 30% profit from Xbox software (which is still not clarified publicly on how it’s measured) could singlehandedly tank even the most stable publisher. During Black Friday, the Xbox product suite was outsold by an offbrand Kinect that carries a subscription service; Xbox tanked their own best-in-class subscription service so hard that the cancellation page briefly crashed. The CEO of Microsoft penned (or based on his AI chatbot reliance, perhaps “penned”) an incomprehensible screed where he said people should not distinguish between “sophistication” and “slop” where AI is concerned. I feel terrible for everyone that still has to work for this abysmal company, especially for the Xbox studio developers that will feel the brunt of the effects of mismanagement in the years to come. 

Runner-Up #1 - The United States Government (48%)

I've been to birthday parties with higher attendance (Image Credit: Al Jazeera)

There was certainly some discussion around how much of the US Government’s mess is applicable to the games industry, and how much is such a pervasive shitshow that a vote is unnecessary. Fortunately, even with this mixed reaction to their presence on the poll, the US Government handily took the first runner-up spot. As part of their ongoing authoritarian power grab within the country, the convicted rapist and twice-impeached leader of the executive branch has instituted an affordability crisis. Tariffs were the first blow, impacting many hardware releases (even the Switch 2), and the results have been nothing short of apocalyptic for the board game industry. Lest the president and his cabinet of D-tier Monster Manual lookalikes assume all the responsibility, Congress utterly failed (as of the time of writing) to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, which will further decimate the independent games media and development landscapes. It’s incredibly hard to understand the scope to which the richest nation on Earth has failed to take care of its people, beyond a shrinking minority of overgrown toddlers. With the games industry on already shaky ground, this active fracking of people’s disposable incomes feels destined to push people away from games as a hobby, and certainly paid software in favor of those “black hole” free to play games that eat up the majority of players’ engagement.

Runner-Up #2 - MindsEye (25%)

Sorry. (Image Credit: Game Rant)

What a comparative relief after the last two paragraphs to have a terrible video game make this list. The warning signs were all over this game prior to launch, with a wave of studio departures and bizarre public statements from the heads of Build A Rocket Boy, Mark Gerhard and Leslie Benzies. After the release of the game and a way more negative reception than most anyone anticipated, those guys blamed “lazy and incompetent” employees, then made sabotage allegations. In the face of impending layoffs, the worker’s union filed a lawsuit alleging “a disastrous handling of redundancies”, which included elementary mistakes in the process alongside the usual abuses of employees. The game itself was a glitch-riddled mess, and it will likely go down in the same breath as Concord for all-time video game bombs. 

Community Write-In Winner - Roblox

Chat, is this good? (Image Credit: Spectrum News)

This one is on me for not including in the year-end writeup. Every development / Jason Fanelli rant I absorbed felt like it was the same story as in 2024, so I let this subject thrum in the background like a dying refrigerator. Well, that was certainly a mistake, which the CEO generously proved by crashing out in an interview with the New York Times mere days after I posted the poll. Did he say child predators are not just a problem, but an opportunity as well? I think you know as well as I do that he did. Several US states also sued Roblox, while Florida of all places opened a criminal investigation against the company. In short, 2024 presented the dire state of Roblox, and in 2025 Roblox did… basically nothing about any of its causes. When this child exploitation engine eventually implodes, 2025 is probably the year people will point to where it all went wrong for Roblox.

Honorable Mention - Collective Shout, and Extremist Attacks on Payment Processors in General

(Image Credit: TweakTown)

In times of oppression, particularly the authoritarian reactionary variety, art is a refuge for the threatened. It’s highly unsurprising that the 21st century edition of this awful, stupid movement has targeted books, films, and video games with even a hint of LGBTQIA+ friendly material. Collective Shout is an Australian organization that is presumably staffed by sentient koala chlamydia, and their suspiciously well-funded effort to pressure payment providers into censoring gaming platforms worked unexpectedly well in 2025. Many games saw removal on both Steam and Itch.io, as the platforms caved under the implicit threat of Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and Stripe freezing transactions. While some games were restored (under specific conditions), the payment processors appear to have successfully resisted massive pressure from the gaming community to reverse their course. I hope one day these people can fill hateful void in their lives with something positive, that they can enjoy things instead of attempting to rob others of their own enjoyment. Until then, they can get rooted.

Other Candidates Receiving Votes:

AbleGamers - 5%

Bungie - 11%

Electronic Arts - 18%

GameStop - 2%

Gamurs - 2%

Green Games Showcase - 2%

Krafton - 11%

Nintendo - 2%

Randy Pitchford - 14%

Splitgate 2 - 7%

Take-Two Interactive / Rockstar - 2%

Ubisoft - 9%

Valnet - 2%

WB Games - 2%

Last year, I concluded by saying “let’s all hope for a better than expected 2025”. So this year, I’ll take a different tack: make a big, sloppy, Hot Mess of it all to your heart’s content. Thanks to everyone who voted, or read, or even just smiled at the mention of “Hottest Mess” in 2025. This feature will return for 2026, hopefully later rather than sooner.