Greetings, Patient Gamers! 2025 is winding down - incredible, I know - and if this year is anything like previous ones that means a lot of our users are gearing up to make their big year-end gaming posts. We love that this has become a thing our sub does, and in order to keep that tradition alive and healthy, we're expanding on our posting guidelines to ensure everyone stays sane and happy. First, let's revisit our general "Dos and Don'ts" of the year-end posts carried forward for this year.
If you want to make a 2025 year-end roundup post...
DO
- Write something about the games you're including. You don't have to write at length about all of them of course, but in general we're interested in your thoughts, not in looking at a simple list.
- Feel free to link to your other, more detailed review posts on this subreddit about the games in your roundup if appropriate/relevant. We're building a community, and we want to celebrate your hard work and creativity.
- Use spoiler tags in your posts and comments whenever you're talking about anything remotely spoiler-worthy in the game. The nature of this subreddit is such that even games that are decades old are still being discovered by new people daily, and we want everyone to have a chance to experience those games without being spoiled.
DO NOT
- Include any games in your post that are newer than 12 months old, including any unreleased or early access titles (no matter how long they've spent in early access). These will cause your post to be removed per Rule 1.
- Use AI to create or aid in the creation of your post. You will be permanently banned under Rule 9. If you're still learning English, just tell us so and use this as an opportunity to practice! We'd be honored to be part of your journey.
- Be rude to anyone on account of spelling/grammatical issues, differing opinions about games, or for any reason at all. You always have the choice to be kind, and users who choose otherwise will see their comments removed per Rule 5, with possible further action taken against offenders. If you see someone falling short of this guideline, please simply report them and move on. Do not engage.
- Link to your own external content (linked images on dedicated hosting sites excepted), or to store pages of games. You can mention you got a game on sale or even free, but mentioning a game's price will trigger an automatic removal per Rule 6.
- Feel obligated to follow any one kind of format for your post. As long as it's within these general guidelines, you're in good shape.
- Consider yourself obligated to participate in our annual "roundup of roundups" meta exercise. If you want to post a 2025 retrospective but not have your post included in the meta stats and ratings, just say so in the post or message the mods and we'll exclude you from the aggregate. You can get a sense of what that exercise looks like here.
Now that the basics are out of the way, let's check out what's new for this year...
Patch Notes v2.025 (Seriously, read this part)
To ease the burden on the mod team we've put several new controls in place that everyone participating in this community exercise will need to follow.
NEW CONTENT
- A new "Year in Review" post flair has been added! All year-end roundup posts must use this new "Year in Review" post flair.
- We're setting up a dedicated flair this time around so that the Multi-Game Review flair can still function normally and people who don't want to see the year-end posts can still filter out the noise.
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
- Year-end roundup posts may only be posted between Monday, December 29th, 2025 and Friday, January 16th, 2026. Year-end roundups posted outside this window will be removed.
- That's a roughly three week window, which should be ample time, and it circumvents the need for excessive moderation activity over the holidays (we were pretty darn burned out last year, let me tell you).
- From now until at least the end of the above posting window, post flair is required for all new posts.
- This will help ensure we don't get posts slipping through the cracks and enable some of our backend improvements to do their job.
BUG FIXES
- All year-end roundup posts must be manually reviewed and approved by a mod before going live.
- We get that this one kinda sucks because it takes some timing control away from the users, and for that we're genuinely sorry. However, we've discovered that these posts have a higher likelihood of unintentional rule breaking, and it creates a ton of friction to have a post removed for a rule violation after it's already generated some discussion. By putting these into a review queue we can catch and resolve the issues before they go live so that you can just enjoy the discussion without worry once it gets posted. On our side we promise to be as responsive as possible so that nobody is waiting an undue amount of time for review.
Postings for 'Year in Reviews' are now allowed until Friday, Jan 16th.
If you -really- hate these, you can filter them out, or just not visit for a few weeks. We understand and will be happy to see you when you get back. Complaints about them will be removed.
TL:DR version of the above guidelines for posting:
Thanks for all you have done to make this a smooth process. I really like both reading and writing these reviews, and this seems like a reasonable way to go about it as the sub keeps growing.
I really like this change, people were posting their list well into the first days of December.
We had a couple November entries too last year, so I knew I wanted to get this up before Thanksgiving to preempt any issues. Kinda weird to announce this more than a month before the actual window, but hopefully we'll have a lot less confusion!
You don't know how much I appreciate this rule. From small things that trigger me way more than they should, people posting year-end lists so early is definitely one of them.
It's fine enough if they know they're not going to finish any other game this year, but when I see the list of 50-100 games in very early December, I usually find it hard to believe.
And I can't not notice the irony of this being a 'patient' gamers sub
I kind of liked that it was stretched like that. I could read one, two or three daily and not get burned out. Now that there is a time gate, when it'll be opened, I bet that more than 50 will be posted in one day, making them just simply boring. And I loved these posts! I read like 100 of them each year. Last year, if I remembered corectly, there was 200 something, right?
I don't want to read 10 of them at once and got bored because of their quantity alone.
Last year I was so into it, I created my own spreadsheet with my time played and all kind of fun statistics, specificaly to share with the community this year. Who knows, maybe someone will copy it and start their own?
The time gate could be a bit longer but everyone's rush to post it ASAP was silly and against the spirit of this sub. I think it's fine if someone posted it because they knew that they were not going to finish any more games that year, but too many people had finished like 50 games posted their summary in the first week of December and I'm supposed to believe that's it, they're done gaming for the year, especially during festive / resting season?
It's just stupid, imo. I get your argument that it's more fun if it's more spread out but I've a feeling people rushed it to be as early as possible with it, cause they may have been worried that if they posted it later, it wouldn't be read by anyone, cause people got oversaturated with this.
I kind of disagree, respectfully :)
I will post mine in january specifically to avoid being drown in literally hundreds of other posts in the first two to five days, depending on the tempo of mod approval. I bet that like 90% of us here will read, what, 10? 20 of them in one sitting? If mods will post a hundred of those in one day, I guarantee you that more than half of them won't be red by majority of this sub, which is a bummer.
I mean, my average reading habbits of different subs look like this: I click a thread that interests me, read through it and then read the comments. If the thread has hundreds of comments, I will usually read through the top ones, maybe sort by controversial and read a few of those to get the full picture and I'm done. I presume this will have a similar effect. I will read a few (3-5) "year reviews" in full, scroll through comments, then maybe two more in bullet points, then maybe two more of only the games I'm familiar with, and I'm done. And then two things happen:
1. On day one after the thread gates will have opened, I'll be tired when I'll see that 50 more are pending.
2. In two days, when I'll want to read a few more, a hundred of them posted the day before yesterday will be burried by 50 more posted today. This is how Reddit works.
I get that "the gates" are about to make the mods lives easier and I'm all for it, but in my opinion this is a bad idea for the end reader experience. Does it really bother you (or anyone for that matter) that someones list will be a month earlier when it's named "my year of gaming"? I mean, really?
EDIT: Unless I didn't read it correctly and the mods will "hold on" to those posts and release them periodically. Then all of the above is irrelevant because I'm under the assumption that the "gate opening" is exactly that. A flood.
I'm a long time lurker of this sub and wanted to post my review of Unreal II: The Awakening, but my post got taken down by the bot for not having enough karma in this sub. Would any of you kind patient gamers care to upvote my comment so I can share my thoughts?
Post it in the bi-weekly thread! You'll get engagement there, and more importantly it's a great place to engage with others' thoughts and build the community karma you need to make a post.
What's the general rule of thumb for games that were newer than 12 months old when completed but are now older by the end of the year? For example, I played Astro Bot in January so it wasn't a "patient" game then since it was only 4 months old at the time but once I write my post it WILL have been over a year since it was released.
Good question!
Most if not all 2024 releases should be rolled off our filters by the time the posting window opens, so you're not going to be prevented from talking about them in your recaps. We'd just ask that you handle these cases mindfully and review them with an eye toward patient gaming. So something like "I got Astro Bot on release and spent the next several weeks playing it because all the hype was real" is clearly not a patient gaming perspective and might invite some mod scrutiny. Something like "Astro Bot is great and here's why" is totally fine, even if in this case you played it in January on an "impatient" timetable.
Basically, we're sympathetic to users' desire to be comprehensive and don't want to step on that. Just like... don't make us, you know?
I actually had a similar sort of question about this kind of thing, and looking back at this thread reminded me of what I wanted to ask.
While games must be a year old to be discussed, what is the rule regarding consoles (specifically if you name a console under a year old in a post about a game? I am thinking particularly about the switch 2.
There is a switch 1 game that I hope to drop a review of on the sub at some point, and I would likely be interested in mentioning the possibility of this game getting a sequel (which is unknown right now). That sequel would have to be on the switch 2 if there are immediate plans for a followup.
For example if I reviewed Metroid Dread (actually I already did months ago) and then mentioned my thoughts on the prospect of a currently unconfirmed Dread sequel releasing on the switch 2, would the post be invalid for namedropping the switch 2?
In short, yes: Rule 1 explicitly pertains to both newer games as well as newer consoles.
You are allowed to say something like "I hope they make another X down the road" but you would just omit the part about what system it'd be on.
Makes sense.
One other thing, if you name a sequel that is not confirmed to exist like Half Life 3 or Dead Space 4, do any rules apply?
What if the sequel has been super heavily rumoured or even leaked to the point everyone is certain it will be revealed, but the official developer/publisher never confirmed the game?
Or perhaps you talk about a tenth resident evil in a review about resident evil Requiem (after Requiem is over a year old), because you know there will be a tenth resident evil in the next few years. Is it free game as long as it hasn't been announced by the creators?
We only add stuff to our automatic filters once confirmed to exist. However, since dodging the hype of upcoming releases is pretty much the point of this sub, speculating at length about an all-but-confirmed title would probably not align with the spirit of the rule.
In other words, don't overthink it and get bogged down by edge cases. Just keep to the spirit of what we're about as well as to the well-defined "main road" of the rules as written and you should be fine.
Thanks for explaining these things, I will remember it!
Indeed that is a great point that giving too much emphasis to hypothetical, future games wouldn't really be in the spirit of the community which is about avoiding hype of upcoming/brand new games. I was never intending to go in depth about an unreleased, hypothetical sequel in a review post. Mainly I was just wondering if so much as mentioning an unconfirmed future game like dead space 4 was as unacceptable as naming a brand new upcoming game like Kirby Air Riders, and you made it all quite clear.
Thanks! My initial idea was to a section at the end called "Impatient Games" where I only give the title and a score, no write-up like all the games above it will have. Would basically just include games like this or games that, like you said, I couldn't ignore the hype on (Expedition 33, Donkey Kong Bananza) but I still want to briefly mention without giving a more complete review. If that's cool then I'll stick with that, unless those newer titles will get caught in the filter. If that will happen then I can leave it out or instead just make it a separate comment under my post for it.
To be clear, any 2025 releases will absolutely still be filtered/prevented, so stuff like Bananza or Expedition 33 won't be able to show up at all (and anyone trying to sneak around this restriction will just have their post removed for Rule 1). My above reply is only applicable to 2024 titles.
Has there been any discussion about allowing us to have a small subsection of "these are games I completed that weren't patient games, but I'm listing them to be comprehensive, without further discussion" in our lists, without moderator scrutiny or removal of the post(s)? Maybe they could have an approved header.
Sorry, OCD. Lol.
No, I'm afraid that's not in the cards for a few reasons.
So we do unfortunately need to take a pretty hard line on this point, but hopefully one of the ideas under #2 up there will get you close enough to where you want to be.
I appreciate your answer and the discussion here as always. This is a fantastic community and thank you for your hard work, and I hope you and the mods if you are celebrating have a wonderful holiday.
So will it be ok to just write in the title all the games I've played this year or something and then in the text say that "Besides the list below, I've played three games from this year but the rules of this sub prevent my OCD from manifesting. Anyway, here's the list?" :)
Yes and no. You could certainly say something like "I also played a few less-than-patient games" in passing, but there's no need to turn that into a complaint about the sub rules. We'd also recommend not minimizing the suffering of people who actually have OCD by turning it into a casual throwaway line. But sure, you can reference your impatient gaming in a general way as part of the larger post. Thanks for asking!
I have several non-patient games I’d like to mention but to retain the spirit of these posts, I’ll instead list them with just scores for each in a separate comment under my post later.
Thank you! I am very much looking forward to reading the posts. I tried to post myself last year but lacked the sub karma, I have commented a few times this year so hoping I will be eligible. Writing posts like these is a good way to pass recommendations to others as well as reflecting on what you liked yourself.
has it been almost a year?
well like most we play it'll be another five until we comment; this comment is under review, will be rectified when possible
I've been preparing my list this entire year. I'm sure you will like it.
Looking forward to it!
Well my list is almost half the size it was last year much to my regret.
In preparation however I wrote some thoughts on each game I finished, shortly after finishing them, so I have already done like 85% of the work already, unlike last year where I wrote about every single game in one sitting and posted it on the final day!
I have mine kind of finished too. I liked the last year's lists so much that in connection with my statistcs OCD I made a chart to track all of my gaming habbits. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and I cannot wait to share it with this community, as well as with r/dataisbeautful. I have a feeling they will love it down there.
Looking forward to seeing all the reviews
Looks like a good step in the right direction
Love the new posting window! Excited to be part of this for a second year
Nice, these are really fun to read always! Joinned the sub this year and it's been a medicine to my work boredom to go through this sub. Can't wait to see what people have been gaming on this year!
Don't forget that if you will feel the creative side in you, you have to have some sub karma over here to post it.
Question about Nintendo Switch Online and NS1 games on the Switch 2. This is listed in the rules…
The Nintendo Switch 2 was released this year and I understand not including titles exclusive to that console, makes sense. I personally own a Switch and then upgraded to a Switch 2. However, I then played a few games on Nintendo Switch Online on my NS2. Even though it’s on the newer console, NSO games don’t offer any different of an experience on either console (except GameCube since those can only be played on NS2). They’re purchased through a subscription which I’ve had for years, kinda a weird gray area of being considered a “new” release. So if I listed The Legend of Zelda under Nintendo Switch 2, will that get removed or is it fair game? Or is it best if I just list it under “Nintendo Switch Online” to avoid this mess?
Same question goes for older NS1 games purchased and playing on the NS2. These are games that do NOT have an NS2 version. Basically playing a patient NS1 game on an NS2 that has no improvements being played on the newer console, just the convenience of what was hooked up to my TV at the time.
IMO as long as the game isn’t an NS2 exclusive or an NS2-specific version of the game, I don’t see much of a difference. Would be similar to playing an older PC game on a custom built PC with the latest high-end parts from 2025. Of course, I’ll leave this up to the discretion of the mods to determine what’s allowed and what isn’t.
Reasonable question. It's the same idea as playing a PS4 game/edition on the PS5: you're still playing a <last gen> game with a <last gen> experience and therefore don't even need to mention that you're playing it on a backwards compatible <current gen> console. So for the NSO games if you feel the need to mention that you're playing them on NSO, that's sufficient in itself; no need to specify S1 vs. S2. For Switch games being played on Switch 2 in their original forms, you'd still just classify them as Switch games and leave it at that. Basically just sidestepping the entire issue.
Perfect, sounds good. Thanks!
Good job I'm off work for the first week of the posting window to read every single one of your lovely round ups :)
How much sub karma do you need to post? I have some, but twice now my posts have been removed for not having enough.
We don't publicize the exact threshold, but as a general rule of thumb if you spend a couple weeks actively engaging with the bi-weekly thread and/or other users' posts, you'll likely be fine.
As a follow up to this, *are* new members allowed to write comments to others' posts if we're new and have no karma? I did that in a different sub and that wasn't kosher. I don't see anything about it in your rules, but I also might not know the right places to look.
Yep! We strongly encourage that, in fact. It's only top line posts that are karma restricted.
Gotcha, thanks
Question about the pricing rule: is saying the game is overpriced allowed? Because that is a genuine criticism for many games.
And one more thing I remember from last year’s reviews: would be helpful if the bots didn’t automatically ban certain abbreviations. I ran into trouble last year because I wrote about Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire (PoE2), and some mods and the bots took down my post because they thought it was about Path of Exile 2
Saying a game is overpriced in general is fine; it's only talking about the specific price points that'll cause Rule 6 removals.
Yeah, the abbreviations issue is one that we deal with on a case by case basis. You'd be surprised how often people try to dodge our filters by abbreviating game names - your false positive for Pillars of Eternity 2 was unfortunate but having that filter in place prevented the need for manual action on many more posts about Path of Exile 2 that would've been disallowed. Edge cases like yours do regrettably pop up from time to time, so in those cases we'd just ask the users to reach out to us and we'll happily work with you to get things restored. I wish we had a more perfect system and I'm certainly open to suggestions on what one might look like!
Thanks for the reply! Ok I’ll be sure to avoid concrete price mentions.
And yeah it’s fine with the abbreviations, least I know what to avoid for this year’s post 😋
Hey one more question! Sorry! The window.... which time zone applies here? I doubt I'll post right on the 29th but if I do, just wanted to check what time zone I should take into account....
We don't have any "official" time zone, especially since all our active mods reside in different countries. Just abide by the posting window within your own local time zone and we'll make it work.
Mods, I'm weary of one thing though. This year there was a major thing on r/art with mods abusing their power. Turns out that they were power hungry and had godlike dellusions enough for Reddit staff to intervene.
Not saying that the situation here is anything like that, but I hope that between the flood of the end of the year posts and your own free time in christmass period you'll have enough patience not to ban any of us if we happen to unknowingly break a rule or two.
Stick around a while. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Hey mods, one more question. What are the rules for reviewing adult games like erotic novels? Or games banned in some countries? Like the one where you play on current war's front or whatever? I see no such restrictions in official rules of this sub.
EDIT: As well as a link to my google spreadsheet showing statistics and hard data? :)
As long as you mark discussion around NSFW games with the NSFW tag you're fine.
Hi, I have a question about "DO NOT Use AI to create or aid in the creation of your post. You will be permanently banned under Rule 9. If you're still learning English, just tell us so and use this as an opportunity to practice! We'd be honored to be part of your journey."
I have my mini reviews in a spreadsheet format like this and I was thinking of using AI to simply turn it into a reddit post in list format, with each item being like: <Game Name (Year) - Review text>.
As long as the AI doesn't change a word of the actual mini reviews, would that be allowed, or do I need to do the busywork of reformatting the spreadsheet into a reddit post manually?
Copying and pasting is certainly safer, but ultimately it's your call. We're not going to individually approve any AI generated content, so if your post is found to contain it Rule 9 will be applied. If your post does not contain it you'll be fine.
Is it time?
Is it supposed to take 5h to review a year-end post? I’ve been stuck in the moderation queue 🫣
There's currently about a dozen in the queue and both our moderators are US based (IE: We just woke up, give us a minute).
Thanks!
Ah my bad, I thought there were some European moderators active as well... Thanks!
Long time lurker here!! I deeply enjoy reading these posts and have one prepared to share here shortly. Once Karma allows :)