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Where does the money go when we buy videogames?

"An absolute outrage!"; "Shameful exploitation"; "I love living in rip-off Britain". Just a small selection of reader reaction to the news that the 3DS would sell for around £230 when it debuted in the UK.

When Rovio boss Peter Vesterbacka last month declared "console games are dying", the game industry raised its collective eyebrow. Here was the brains behind Angry Birds - one of mobile gaming's greatest weapons in the virtual battle for our hearts and minds - launching an attack on what has been, for many of us, our preferred method of engaging with our hobby for as long as we can remember.

Video game graphics achieved using the DirectX 11 standard provide a solid indication of the visual power of the next Xbox and PlayStation, Eurogamer has been told.

From its humble roots as a conduit for Counter-Strike back in 2003 to its current status as a digital delivery juggernaut with over 30 million subscribers, Steam's rise has been little short of remarkable. With an estimated 70 per cent share of the entire PC market, Valve's store has transformed a small developer into one of the games industry's most powerful players.

"Make no mistake," said SEGA this week, "if one quarter of the people that usually pirate [Football Manager] switch to purchasing Football Manager 2012, the sales of the game worldwide would more than double." That was the eye-opening statistic used to justify Football Manager 2012 requiring Steam to play. In other words, more than 80 per cent of people playing Football Manager are doing so with a pirated copy.

Cobalt, Minecraft developer Mojang's first foray into third party publishing, should launch this week, developer Oxeye Games has announced.

Canadian developer Brian Provinciano spent two months negotiating his contract with Microsoft to get Retro City Rampage on Xbox Live Arcade. It was, to say the least, a tough process - and one that he could have done without. It delayed the creation of the game, but in the end he thought f*** it, and signed on the bottom line.

"Man only interested in the climax. You must be a real hit with the ladies."

It's just over 11 years since we flipped the switch on Eurogamer and started pumping our thoughts about games out into the world, and this will be the seventh game of the year we've named in that time. Despite a few leftfield choices along the way though (Psychonauts in 2005 is still my favourite), we've never crowned an RPG - until today.

Enslaved isn't my favourite game of 2010. It isn't the title I spent the most time playing. It doesn't even fit within the central themes which ran through my gaming year: dancing, farming, waggling, waving and platforming like it's 1994.

A series with as many epoch-defining entries as Mario is bound to mark a few special spots in your gaming history. My first videogame was Super Mario World. Super Mario 64 inspired me so much that I wrote my very first review about it, aged 8. But after that, as with any favourite series, it settled into a comfortable rhythm; you know what to expect, and you're delighted every time you get it, but it doesn't change your world any more. I didn't think that a Mario game could have that kind of impact on me again. But this year, it did.

Red Dead Redemption is the work of game makers at the peak of their powers and confidence. What defines the experience is not simply how much Rockstar has crammed into the world it has crafted, but also what it has left out.

Have you ever looked at a game and seen something so technically advanced, so different and so far ahead of almost everything else you've seen, that you just can't quite believe that it's running on your trusty console? Over the years, only a few choice titles spring to mind, but Sony Santa Monica's magnificent God of War III is undoubtedly the latest example. It looks and feels like a next-gen game that in some way, somehow, miraculously, manages to run on current-gen hardware.

They got me again when I found the MSV Estevanico.

I have a confession to make. I've not actually played Dragon Quest IX. Well, that's not technically true - I did spend a few minutes on it, back in September. It looked very nice. So why has it ended up as my game of the year?

"Fisher? You'll pay for what you did to Robertson! Hear me, Fisher? This won't end like it did at the airfield!"

Games of the quality of A Shadow's Tale used to fall through the cracks all the time. We used to get all indignant and shouty about publisher indifference to games like Katamari Damacy, Sly Raccoon and Psychonauts and then promptly dish out game of the year awards to make up for the rank injustice. It probably didn't make a lot of difference in the grand scheme of things, but it made us (and the 147 people who bought them) feel a bit better.

Need for Speed is the Britney Spears of video game brands, a cipher to front whichever hot producer or fashionable trend its owner, EA, wants to hand creative duties to on any given year. As a result, its games may provide a consistent financial yield, but they are also the hardest to pick out from a line-up, flitting from arcade slang street-racer one year to straight-talking sim the next. Who is Need for Speed? It's whoever's driving the development at any given time.

Following the media trajectory of this free-form building and survival game has almost been more compulsive than Minecraft itself. Watching that slow burn from lo-fi obscurity to darling of indie sites to mainstream PC gaming acceptance to woah-hey-everywhere has been an ambient pastime for 2010. That was before the game even hit beta status.

Like a comet made of gold, glitter and Lady Gaga's eyelashes, Robot Unicorn Attack circled the Earth and filled the firmament with its irresistible radiance for the whole of 2010. It changed lives. It challenged sexualities. It involves pressing two buttons. It is undoubtedly the greatest game of all time which features a Robot Unicorn, unless you're a metalhead who digs its sequel.

How do you measure your greatest gaming experiences? In the intensity of your involvement with the game - be it emotional, physical, sensory, cerebral? I think that's as good a yardstick as any. But it can put a professional games reviewer like me at a disadvantage.

What I take away from Dragon Age is a sense of having been somewhere. No, more than that. Having lived somewhere. In most well-established gaming worlds I feel as though I've been a visitor. Dragon Age was my home.

Street Fighter IV wasn't my game of 2009. 2009 was my year of Street Fighter IV.

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks isn't my game of the year. Demon's Souls is. In fact Demon's Souls is my game of the decade. If I could, I would be Mrs Demon's Souls. But I've written and blithered and shared and pored over so many words about bloody Demon's Souls over the past eight months that I'm completely spent and literally everyone in my acquaintance is bored to death of hearing me talk about it, so instead I'm going to write about my second-favourite game of the year.

I didn't fully appreciate how good Uncharted 2 is until I played Halo 3: ODST. "Naughty Dog" is about right. The studio did, after all, ruin a game I'd been looking forward to all year. Bungie wasn't to know I'd play ODST right after the return of Nathan Drake, of course. But boy, that was a mistake.

There is something of an irony in Eurogamer's technology editor drawing this particular game: there are no 3D visuals, it doesn't run on a state-of-the-art engine and you don't require cutting-edge technology to play it. And yet Firemint's Flight Control is a work of gaming genius that stands proud alongside the likes of Uncharted 2 and Assassin's Creed II as one of the best games of the year, and at 59p it's the cheapest too.

No one sets out to make a bad game. Conversely, not enough people set out to make a really brilliant game. Sometimes, though, it happens anyway. That's Canabalt - a one-button, one-man, one-idea Flash game originally created as a fun but throwaway entry in an Experimental Gameplay Project competition. It's been my go-to game in any idle moment over the last few months, and the strange grey world that I most often see when I close my eyes and let my imagination idle.

Gargantuan fantasy role-playing game Skyrim is the UK's Christmas 2011 number one.

Scoring a goal is the path to many celebrations... some would consider unnatural.