Probably the remake of the Another Code/Trace Memory games. I did not see that one coming.

Ubisoft shutting down Trials Fusion servers - it had active community that made and played new maps and tournaments, the PS4 version had hundreds of players compete in every tournament, and Ubisoft just went and shut it down without any notice, unbelievable. All those thousands of user made tracks are not available anymore. In total it was over 200k tracks, of course most of them were poor but there were thousands of good and great and phenomenal tracks among those 200k. I'm very pissed as a player, I can't imagine how pissed are the track authors, even if they have access to their tracks, they can't simply import them into the newer Trials game Rising which apparently will but shut down anyway sooner or later.

Positive surprise: How big of a thing BG3 became. It's not that different from Larian's previous RPGs, so what happened? The close-up conversations with characters and proper acting? I guess a little bit of presentation goes a long way.
Negative surprise: The absolute state of Insomniac, one of my favorite developers. Holy shit, they are ravaged by the woke virus right now, forget covid. Either that, or they have to play that tune because they have taken some of that sweet ESG money, which comes with certain conditions. Hope it's enough to cover for all the alienation that it will cause in fans. But hey, there's always the normies, they don't know anything. They just see Spider-Man on the cover and that's it, boom, sales.

If we are to make a competition between the most surprising remakes announced by Nintendo, then the Another Code Recollection one is on the same level of our of left field surprise that no one would have EVER put on a bingo card

But Super Mario RPG remake (knowing previous problematic history of the IP ownership) and the Thousand Year Door Paper Mario remake are great surprises as well.

Xbox having its actual best game of the year released on a shadow dropped notice.
Hi-Fi Rush really set the tempo for what was coming this year.

The BIG price increases of the Sony online services

The surprise release of Xenoblade 3 Future Redeemed in April a week only after the Direct.

Resident evil 4 was amazing and spider man 2 being my GOTY.

That xbox keeps on buyging game studios and destroying them

Baldur's Gate 3 (this game blew up in sales! the media attention it got)
Super Mario RPG remake (wasn't expecting this at all)
Sea of Stars (its fantastic)
Diablo IV (its player base, is dying way waaay to fast)
Starfield (coming from skyrim, I expected this be huge. But reviews/sales are just mid)

Baldur's Gate III sales numbers, it's insane, but well deserved.

Cyberpunk 2077 comeback; with all the negative press since the release of the main game, I didn't think it had any chance.

How bland Starfield turned out to be. I had some doubts, but it went and fell through the floor of my expectations.

The Star Citizen team actually showing something akin to a finished product, and it looking beyond marvelous.

All the incredibly shitty PC releases, where performance is concerned. I bought an insane rig this spring, and new releases still run like crap at launch.

Diablo IV somehow managing to be even worse than I feared, played for 3 weeks or so and then never touched it again.

The relative success of the Steamdeck; I didn't see that coming at all.

A Call of Duty mainline title finally being deservedly butchered by a, more or less unified, gaming press and gaming community.

People still thinking the Activision/Blizzard purchase will make a positive difference for gamers and developers in any kind of way in the long run.

Epic Games managing to lose money in their incredibly advantageous position on the market. And tied to this point; how poorly Unreal Engine 5 has been utilized so far, it's compounded the very problems it was purpose-built to solve (crazy hardware demands and poor efficiency).

Xenoblade 3 Future Redeemed Quality for what it represent,
But Mario RPG Announcement Made me shed some tears.

Baldurs Gate 3