Calling out AI slop and jettisoning loved ones: five things to make 2026 your best year in gaming

That’s right, it’s January. The rosy-cheeked festivities are a distant memory now, replaced by 2pm sunsets, and promises to yourself to do cold water immersion every morning or get your kerbed alloys refurbished, which you’ll break even before your flakiest mates give up on Veganuary.

The light on the horizon? This time of year is also a chance to set more meaningful, achievable intentions. By which we mean the ones about gaming. Let’s do this. 

They say it serves no one to live with regrets, but whoever ‘they’ are, they probably didn’t spend twixtmas wading through monochromatic bereavement-fest Silent Hill 2 and dripping bitter tears onto their mince pies. 

Every gamer who celebrates Christmas and gets some time off work or school sets aside their Christmas game. A title they deliberately set aside to enjoy at a time when the work:leisure ratio goes haywire and they can properly immerse themselves. Not every gamer, however, picks that Christmas game wisely. 

If you’re unsure whether you picked your Christmas game wisely this year, consider how many times a family member entered the room, saw what was happening on your screen and backed immediately out of the room with a “Oh – I see. I’ll come back".

Breathtaking open worlds: yes, they would make an excellent Christmas game. Harrowing survival horrors, post-apocalyptic shooters and multiplayer titles that make you toss your head back and scream up into the heavens upon defeat: less so.

Suffice to say, next year we will be playing it safe with Assetto Corsa Rally.

The pile of shame has been growing since ‘piles of shame’ (no, the other kind) have been a thing. If we don’t do something soon, our stack of unplayed games will declare itself a self-governing principality.

It’s not enough to simply say we’ll get round to playing more of them this year, and we know this because that’s what we said last year. More drastic measures are required: it’s time to jettison our loved ones.

That’s the only way we’ll carve out the time in our schedules to clear those massive RPGs and epic open-world games we’ve been putting off for far too long, and we’re sure that if we phrase it correctly they’ll understand completely.

We get the games industry we deserve. As much as we like to conjure fantastical images of money-men letting handfuls of gold coins spill through their fingers and cackling when we think about the medium’s current troubles, the truth is that those money-men sell us loot boxes, battle passes and cosmetic items because… well, because we buy them.

Now, that doesn’t mean we’re judging you for buying anything like that. Life can be hard, and if buying a funny little hat for your PUBG avatar makes you smile, then go for it. But if, like us, you feel that current industry practices around payment models feel more predatory than enriching, you have the power to vote with your wallet. 2026 is the year we don’t buy any VC in the latest NBA 2K and then splurge it on fancy footwear, so be warned, Take-Two shareholders.

We’ve been putting this one off for a while now. It’s never too late, right? Never mind that the bar is constantly getting higher, as the surge in sim racing interest borne during those heady lockdown streams that saw Charles Leclerc in a banana outfit has translated to a new generation of alien-level racers.

Never mind that there’s an increasingly vast array of sim racing hardware out there and that direct drive wheels are more affordable than ever, making for a level playing field in equipment terms. 

Never mind that we still don’t make our own setups in Assetto Corsa Competizione.

Never mind that we wear our tyres out in LMU before we even turn the engine on.

This is our year. Probably.

Forgive the soapbox, but upon it we must stand, before 2026 becomes chock-full of soulless generative nonsense and all the talented creators in gaming are forced out of it to go and get proper jobs.

We’ve already started to see studios taking shortcuts, cutting out the roles of human creators and performers for the sake of cost, convenience, and time. That’s a slippery slope that leads all the way down to a pile of slop, so we say now: no AI shortcuts. Let’s keep playing games made by humans.