As the live service wars continue, analyst says games like Black Myth: Wukong, Palworld, and Helldivers 2 prove it's hard to predict the next hit: "All bets are off"

2025 is absolutely stacked with massive games to look forward to - from GTA 6 to whatever launches on the Nintendo Switch successor - but one industry analyst reckons games like Palworld, Black Myth: Wukong, and Helldivers 2 will continue to break through the noise because it's getting "more difficult" to predict the hits.

In an interview with GamesRadar+, Circana executive director Mat Piscatella said that while the mass market chooses titans like Minecraft and Roblox, enthusiast gamers are leaning toward the unexpected, "looking at things like Black: Myth Wukong and Palworld and Helldivers 2... these kinds of games are the ones that are winning."

Still, he doesn't think 2025's busy slate will affect how hard it is for underdog games to quietly find huge success. "You have the two huge things hopefully coming into the market next year with Grand Theft Auto 6 and the next Nintendo hardware device," Piscatella said. "But other than that, I think all bets are off. The games that have broken out this year, I don't know if you can call them all, like... 'Where did this come from?'"

Piscatella even points to the most recent October best-sellers, which had bone-shaking boxing game Undisputed in the top ten chart. "A boxing game hasn't been in the top ten since April 2011... I don't know anyone that even was really thinking about Undisputed before it launched. And here it is, right?"

"So we're constantly getting surprised with these kinds of games that show up and find an audience," he continues, "whereas some of the bigger games that you expect to have an audience are seemingly struggling, right? So it's quite the pickle to try to figure out. Trying to forecast and predict what games are going to be big and which ones aren't is becoming more and more difficult... But it's exciting that the core audiences, those enthusiast audiences, are looking beyond just the biggest, newest, 4, 5, whatever, 6A game people are talking about these days. That these smaller games are finding these audiences is actually really exciting and fun."

To find out what the surprise hits might be, check out the upcoming games of 2025 and beyond.