2022 saw the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the video game industry, slowing hardware sales for most of the year as well as development delays for major titles. The industry continued its trend of acquisitions and mergers, highlighted by Microsoft announcing its plan to acquire Activision Blizzard for nearly $69 billion. The industry as a whole continued to deal with issues such as workplace harassment and discrimination, alongside crunch periods, leading to at least the quality assurance staff at three separate studios to vote to unionize. This year also began a wave of mass layoffs.
Production of the ninth-generation consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, remained constrained for the first part of the year, but eased up later in the year. New hardware trends included the widespread availability of graphics cards with real-time ray tracing, and the release of the Steam Deck by Valve, a handheld personal computing device capable of playing most games available on Steam. The gaming community remained cautious on the metaverse and blockchain games, though leading publishers expressed their desires to move more into that space.
According to market research firm Newton, the global video game industry had total revenues of $184.4 billion, about a 4% decline year-to-year. Half of that was from mobile games, while console games, computer games, and browser games made up 28%, 21%, and 1% of the market, respectively.
The following titles were 2022's top ten best-selling premium games by region (excluding microtransactions and free-to-play titles) on PC and console platforms, for Japan, the United States, and Europe.
Metacritic is an aggregator of video game journalism reviews. It generally considers expansions and re-releases as separate entities.
During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine launched in February that year, several video game developers and publishers with ties to Eastern Europe provided support for Ukrainian aid. On February 24, 11 bit studios pledged to donate all profits earned over the following seven days from This War of Mine (2014) and its downloadable content to the Ukrainian Red Cross. CD Projekt Red donated 1 million zloty (about ) to the Polish Humanitarian Action group. Embracer Group donated to Red Cross, SOS Children's Villages, and ACT Alliance, among other charities. SCS Software donated over to "multiple charities", and released new DLC for American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 to raise funds for Ukrainian charities. The Pokémon Company and Niantic announced they would donate $200K each, alongside an addition $75K raised by Niantic employees, to organisations such as GlobalGiving to provide humanitarian relief in Ukraine. In addition, Niantic announced the suspended availability of Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Ingress in both Russia and Belarus.
Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and Activision Blizzard, among others, halted sales of physical and digital products into Russia during the conflict. Electronic Arts announced on March 2 that it had started the process to remove the Russia national football team and Russian football clubs from its FIFA series as well as removing the Belarusian and Russian national teams and their club teams from NHL 22. In addition to preventing purchase of their games in Russia, Nintendo announced on March 9 that ', a tactical war game with a faction based on Soviet-era Russia, would be indefinitely delayed due to "recent world events".
Two game bundles offered by itch.io and Humble Bundle raised over and for Ukraine aid support, respectively. Epic Games made all proceeds from Fortnite during the last two weeks of March 2022 go to charitable aid for Ukraine, and raised over .
In total nearly was donated to Ukrainian humanitarian relief efforts by gaming companies.