We wanted to do something special for PAX Online x EGX Digital – the digital gaming event from our parent company, ReedPop, which is running this week – and with new PlayStation and Xbox consoles just two months away, a list celebrating the great games of the generation seemed like a no-brainer. And that was before we knew that last week and this would be dominated by news of the price, date and launch line-ups for the two new console families.
There was just one problem. Last year, we ran a feature series on our games of the decade, curated by the Eurogamer team and very much reflecting our personal tastes and obsessions. With the current generation running from November 2013 to now, there was bound to be an awful lot of overlap. How could we make the new list fresh?
The answer was simple: step out of our bubble, ask some other people what they thought, and see what, if any, consensus might form. So we assembled a panel of 19 game developers, critics and journalists – some of our favourite people in the games business – and asked each of them to submit a list of their five favourite games released since November 2013. (That was the only restriction: the games could be of any kind and on any platform.) Then we number-crunched the results to produce a top 10.
