Well hi, hello and how do you do? There's just one last festive tradition to tick off the list before we resume work for the new year, and it's the finest tradition of them all - the Eurogamer reader's top 50 games of the year! 2018 was a fascinating, diverse year for new games, and your list beautifully reflects that - as do your comments. Thank you so much for taking part, and see you all again soon!

What we said: "Mania takes everything that was memorable about Sega's pioneering 2D platformers - that joy in momentum always teetering on the brink of disaster, the deranged magnificence of those levels, the mournful bassnote as poor, faithful Tails stampedes into all the traps you've just triggered in passing - and rejuvenates it, to the point where you can only put down the pad in astonishment. Sonic the Hedgehog happened, everybody.

"He's supposed to be all washed up - gaming's Birdman, a balding, leather-jacketed C-lister they wheel on whenever some Mario crossover finds itself short on backing characters. How the hell is this possible? It's possible because for a small group of dedicated aficionados, the blue blur's halcyon period never ended. What's old has become new, and Sonic is once again the star he was supposed to be."

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Between the popularity of Nintendo Switch (a powerful portable that is easy to adapt old console games to), Xbox's backward compatibility initiative striving to turn console generations into a thing of the past, and publishers' enthusiasm for remastering hits of yore to tap into the nostalgia market - especially after the enormous success of last year's Crash Bandicoot release - it feels like we're spending more time than ever playing and thinking about old games. Or games that aren't brand new, anyway.

To some extent this is about padding the widening gaps in the release schedule as blockbuster games get fewer and further between. But there also seems to be a genuine and very welcome enthusiasm, among players, developers and the industry, to end the cycle of obsolescence that sees so many great games fade into obscurity with their host hardware. There's a huge curation opportunity here as well as a business one, and a chance to make old games feel new again by giving them a lick of paint or putting them in a fresh context.

That's why we've decided to recognise this increasingly important strand of gaming by giving it its own end-of-the-year best-of list - unranked, just like our list of the best games of 2018. Any form of reissue is eligible, and indeed there are as many different approaches here as there are games on the list. Here's to the shock of the old.

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The editor writes: Although we've presented our games of the year in different ways over the years, the Eurogamer team has always compiled the list and chosen the ultimate game of the year by voting among ourselves, as this seemed the fairest way of doing it. But this year, we decided that approach wasn't working any more.

As our personal gaming habits and the video game landscape have changed, several flaws have appeared in the voting system. One was that it would over-represent games that we enjoyed playing in the office together, like FIFA or Overwatch. Another was that it would under-represent certain genres, like PC strategy games or racing games, that were only played by one or two members of the team. The most serious was that it got muddled between the games that were our personal favourites, and the games we, collectively as Eurogamer, thought were best.

This year, curation was the keyword. We compiled the list through discussion instead of voting, with the editor's decision being final on what made the cut, and with the focus being on building a well-rounded picture of the year rather than picking personal favourites. The list was shortened from 50 games to 30 games to increase its focus and make the choices more meaningful. And the list isn't ranked any more. The ranking was a natural byproduct of the voting system, but trying to impose one after the fact exposed how arbitrary it is in such a diverse medium: how do you choose which should be ranked higher of two excellent games of entirely different species - say Return of the Obra Dinn and Super Smash. Bros? It seemed meaningless.

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The editor writes: We'll be publishing Eurogamer's official top 30 games of 2018 tomorrow. In a break with Eurogamer tradition, we didn't put that list together by voting among ourselves this year. But I still asked for everyone on the staff (plus the Digital Foundry team and a couple of our most regular freelance contributors) to submit their favourite games of the year because I thought it would be interesting to build up a picture of what the Eurogamer team really plays and cares about, rather than some homogenised arithmetic byproduct of that.

Each staffer submitted five games, listed in no particular order. Remasters and reissues on new platforms were allowed, as were games which weren't first released in 2018 but which made a major impact or underwent significant changes this year (such as Fortnite). I wanted these lists to reflect about what we were actually playing rather than the release schedule. This is our gaming life, warts and all. Don't judge us too harshly.

Video Team

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Years ago I worked at a cinema with this fellow usher called Jess. Jess was amazing and wise and she worked the popcorn stand, and she worked it in a very particular way. She spent hours and hours there every day, ignoring customers and rooting through the depths of the popcorn, head bowed, a scowl of deepest concentration on her face. It was always the sweet popcorn that held her attention, and rightly so. What she was looking for was the rare, one-in-a-million piece of popcorn that had far more than its fair share of sugar on it. Most popcorn has a sort of matte, papery surface, doesn't it? But these special, over-sugared pieces looked like they had been varnished. They crunched in a different way between your teeth and there was something syrupy to them as they exploded with gritty sugar in your mouth.

What made them all the sweeter, of course, was the one-in-a-million thing. They weren't the norm. They were special. And so to my favourite gaming moment of 2018, which is probably also my favourite gaming moment of the last few years, if I'm being honest. Like a piece of over-sugared popcorn I have probably come upon it once or twice in every year since 2008.

Burnout Paradise has crash gates. These lurid yellow-green things that litter the landscape and mark the entry and exit points of shortcuts. They're like Agility Orbs in Crackdown: there's a limited number of them (400) and once you've started noticing them they become all consuming.

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Picking Sea of Thieves feels like a bit of a cheat. After all, the ever churning innards of Rare's multiplayer pirate adventure are expressly designed to generate memorable adventures. But in a year packed with wow moments (that first glimpse of Subnautica's bountiful choral reef, for one) and full-on WTF moments (why hello there, Fortnite's inter-dimensional butterfly), no other game has, for me at least, managed to create so many wonderful, lasting memories as Sea of Thieves.

So much so, in fact, that it's a bit of a struggle to narrow it down to one. If I had to choose though, it would probably be what started out as a relatively simple moment, a little bit of theatre in a game capable of far grander spectacle. It happened following Sea of Thieves' Cursed Sails update, where, a few minutes after logging in, I found myself anchor down in the middle of nowhere, waves tossing my tiny sloop back and forth, with only the intermittent crash of water against wood to break the silence.

Suddenly, a distant horn rings out across the waves and, after a few moments of strange, uncertain calm, a ragged galleon explodes upward from the murky depths, making its presence known in a roar of rushing water and sea spray.

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New "very hard" levels are coming to platformer Celeste early next year.

In a couple of tweets thanking fans and expressing disbelief at having reached so many people, creator Matt Thorson confirmed the "farewell" levels would be coming in early 2019, as well as hinting that their next project would be announced "in the new year" too (thanks, PC Gamer).

"Celeste sold over 500,000 copies in 2018," Thorson tweeted. "Thank you everyone who played it. We never expected it to reach so many people."

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Bethesda has announced it's giving away Fallout Classic Collection on PC to all players who have logged into Fallout 76 in 2018.

"#HappyHolidays! ANYONE who logged into the full release of #Fallout76 in 2018 will receive an entitlement for Fallout Classic Collection on PC," the tweet says.

Fallout Classic Collection contains Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics. The offer expires at the end of the month, and the free codes are expected to be distributed/go live in early January. While the offer does apply to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One players, too, they'll receive the free game on PC.

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Involuntarily awake at 3AM, blearily scrolling through my Twitter feed, the news of Telltale's majority studio closure was a real heart-stopper, despite the multiple times similar news had already broken this year. Just like that, one moment a developer is there, then they're gone. This, coupled with more than one indie developer opening up about the obligation to turn their games into huge successes to keep their head above water, and several reports of unacceptable working conditions at large-scale studios, made it obvious that video game development is a volatile business, perhaps more than ever.

Telltale is an especially pertinent case, because when a beloved studio abruptly closes, after the smoke clears and the bafflement dissipates, the illusion that many have of video game design as some sort of magical land of endless creativity and piles of money has taken another hit. Telltale is even more than that - it has had great influence on the gaming industry and the way we look at narrative games, to the point that even the words "ex-Telltale employee" are a badge of honour, both for delivering creative storytelling and doing the best in the face of adversity.

A high-pressure environment, unbelievably long hours, steadily shrinking team sizes and finally, being stranded with no health care at the end of it all, are more than mere stumbling blocks, yet they're ones that many thought of as necessary trade-offs for a dream job. They aren't and shouldn't be. It's easier to forget about the human cost of video game development as long as a studio is still intact, as long as the only words we hear are 'redundancy' and 'restructuring'. Once the whole house comes down, there's a shift. It's no longer 'just' a select few people who lost their jobs.

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It looks like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has turned something of a corner - it's back up to over one million concurrent players on Steam for the first time since October.

PUBG has steadily lost players on Valve's platform since an incredible January 2018 peak of 3.2 million concurrent players.

After November 2018 saw a low of 895,650 peak concurrent players, this week has seen a significant increase, with, at the time of publication, 1.1 million concurrent players. It's the first time PUBG's peak concurrent player count has risen since January 2018. All this and we haven't even mentioned the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions.

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