Newzoo: PC and Console Market in 2026
$30-50 games are really trendy now, according to the latest Newzoo report.
Engagement data: 37 markets, excluding China and India. Revenue data: US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy.
Revenue figures exclude taxes, advertising, hardware sales, B2B deals, and gambling.
Market
The PC and console gaming market reached $88.3 billion in 2025, breaking out of a five-year stagnation and returning to growth.
PC market growth has outpaced consoles since 2020, and PC is expected to overtake consoles in total revenue by 2028.
The main growth drivers on PC are Asian markets, Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences, higher average prices (surprising, given Steam’s famous sales), and Valve’s efforts to develop the ecosystem.
Console growth is driven by Nintendo Switch 2, major releases (GTA VI), higher prices for new games and subscriptions, and 10th-generation consoles expected in 2027-2028.
The PC gaming audience reached 936 million players and is on track to hit 1.02 billion by 2028. The console audience reached 645 million in 2025 and will grow to 688 million by 2028. PC audience growth is outpacing consoles (+2.9% CAGR from 2025 to 2028 vs. +2.2%).
PC holds a major advantage over consoles in the large Chinese market (albeit with a fairly low ARPU). Consoles currently lead, thanks to the US and European markets, which have higher ARPU.
Microtransactions dominate on PC (48% of all revenue), while game sales lead on consoles (50% of all revenue). Console microtransactions fell 6.3% in 2025, the only declining sub-segment across the entire revenue picture.
Time Distribution
Total time spent in PC and console games fell 1% in 2025. PC was up (+3% YoY), while Xbox (-3% YoY) and PlayStation (-4% YoY) both declined.
Roblox became the most-played franchise (in this case, a single game) by playtime (+52% YoY), overtaking Fortnite (-29% YoY) and the Call of Duty series (-33%). Among new releases in the top 20: Battlefield (+184% YoY) and Monster Hunter (+127% YoY).
The top 20 franchises still account for more than half of all playtime across platforms, but their share is gradually declining. New releases consistently capture around 13% of total time. Given slow audience growth, the competition is less about acquiring new players and more about redistributing time from existing ones.
The revenue picture looks different. On consoles, 60%+ of all revenue comes from top-20 titles. On PC, that share is 44%. Revenue from the top-10 titles on PC is also declining, meaning earnings are distributed more evenly across the market.
Sandbox is the fastest-growing genre by playtime, up 36% YoY in 2025.
Battle Royale is losing players: the genre shed 27% of user time, driven by Fortnite (-29%) and Apex Legends (-24%).
The successful launches of Battlefield 6 and ARC Raiders weren’t enough to lift the shooter genre overall: playtime fell 5% in 2025. Those two titles, plus the latest Call of Duty, combined accounted for 9% of all shooter playtime in 2025. In 2024, Call of Duty alone accounted for 10%.
❗️The successful shooters of 2025 seem to skew toward an older audience that simply has less time to play.
Looking deeper at player habits: Call of Duty’s audience tends to play other entries in the series and sports games more, and RPGs and adventure games less.
Battlefield 6’s audience gravitates toward varied, often hardcore shooters, and plays fewer sports games and less Roblox.
ARC Raiders’ audience prefers multiplayer and co-op games, but not the monolithic GaaS titles that have been running for decades.
Roblox accounts for 58% of the Sandbox genre’s playtime share, Minecraft for 35%. Notably, these audiences overlap with one another (55% of Minecraft players also play Roblox), but barely overlap with players of sports games or narrative AAA games.
A common question is what Roblox and Minecraft players actually play outside those games. The data suggests they do indeed play narrative AAA games and sports franchises less frequently.
The Sandbox audience (mostly Roblox and Minecraft players) is evenly split by gender and skews younger than most other genres.
Time spent in annualized sports games declined in 2025 (down 5% YoY). The biggest drop among the leaders, both in percentage and absolute terms, was EA Sports FC (FIFA): -13% in 2025. Madden NFL and College Football also fell (-9% YoY). On the positive side, NBA 2K (+11% YoY), MLB The Show (+15% YoY), and Rocket League (+8% YoY), which can’t exactly be called an annual release, are growing.
Old and New Games in 2025
New releases have consistently captured 12-13% of total user time for the past three years. The biggest attention-getters among new releases in 2025 were EA Sports FC 26, Battlefield 6, and Escape From Tarkov (counting its exit from Early Access).
On PC, the most time (among older games) is spent on Roblox (9.7% of all playtime), Counter-Strike 2 (7%), and League of Legends (6.9%).
On PlayStation, players spend the most time in games that are one to five years old. Roblox falls into this category, having launched on the platform in 2023, though how accurately that’s classified is debatable.
Xbox has the highest share of new releases in playtime among all three platforms: 18%.
The role of franchises in playtime share is growing on PC and Xbox, and stable on PlayStation. In 2025, however, the structure shifted: the share of annualized franchises on consoles declined, while non-annualized franchises grew (Monster Hunter, Battlefield 6, Elden Ring, Borderlands). On PC, annualized franchises barely register in 2025 playtime at all.
Looking at new release revenue, franchises accounted for 32% (on PC) to 44% (on PlayStation) of the total in 2025.
Market Concentration
Good news: market concentration by playtime decreased across all three platforms in 2025, meaning titles outside the top 20 captured more time than before.
That said, the bulk of user time still goes to the big names in the top 20.
On PC, Marvel Rivals (1.2% of all time, #13) and Wuthering Waves (0.9%, #18) made the top 20 rankings for the first time.
PC playtime growth since 2022 has been driven entirely by time spent on games outside the top 20. In 2025, 79 games on PC account for 80% of all user playtime.
Games outside the top 20 on PC are predominantly B2P, with a higher share of RPGs and adventure titles. The top 20 (by playtime, importantly) is dominated by F2P shooters.
On PlayStation, Marvel Rivals (2.3% of time, #12), Monster Hunter Wilds (1.3%, #13), and Battlefield 6 (1.1%, #15) all entered the top 20 by playtime for the first time. Every title in the top 20 is a large, established IP.
74 titles on PlayStation generate 80% of all playtime.
On PlayStation, the long tail of engagement is made up of premium titles, mostly adventure games and RPGs.
❗️This is really more of a format question than a depth-of-engagement one. Most adventure games and RPGs are finishable, and not designed for thousands of hours. Revenue or ARPU would tell more of the success here.
Xbox mirrors PC player preferences, with a slightly stronger lean toward sports games.
80% of all Xbox playtime is concentrated in 91 titles, the highest figure among all three platforms, thanks to Game Pass.
The breakdown of titles inside and outside the top 20 by playtime looks very similar to PlayStation. The main difference is a slightly higher share of new releases, again thanks to Game Pass.
Monetization
Across major Western markets, playtime is falling on all platforms. B2P playtime is growing across all platforms, while F2P playtime is declining. The steepest drop among individual titles was Call of Duty (-25.5% playtime on PlayStation and -59.4% on PC year-over-year).
Revenue on PC grew for the year (B2P sales jumped 17.4%). PlayStation saw a slight decline (F2P revenue fell 8.2%). Xbox had the steepest drop (F2P revenue down 23.6%). Call of Duty’s revenue decline was even more pronounced than its engagement drop year-over-year.
PC is the only platform where F2P monetization improved: revenue per hour of play grew 10% YoY and by the end of 2025 is running at 2x PlayStation and 3x Xbox.
Fortnite on PC saw a decline in playtime in 2025, but grew 1.7x year-over-year in revenue per hour played.
On PlayStation, Roblox underperforms on this metric (0.5x the average), while Asian gacha titles (Genshin Impact at 3.9x and Infinity Nikki at 8.6x) significantly outperform.
On Xbox, most titles monetize worse than Fortnite by revenue per hour played. Interestingly, The Sims 4 has the best result on the platform (2.6x the average).
Looking at revenue by price tier, the majority of console revenue (76-79% in 2025) comes from titles priced above $50 MSRP. PC is a very different picture: the market is nearly evenly split between titles priced below $30, $30-$50, and above $50.
The sub-$30 segment on PC grew 40% from 2022 to 2025, with new releases accounting for nearly half of that. On PlayStation, growth was even higher at 50% over the same period, but the segment is much smaller in absolute terms, and back-catalog titles dominate. Xbox looks similar to PlayStation, with an even smaller segment and even heavier back-catalog dominance.
Revenue from new releases on PC in the sub-$30 tier jumped 156% since 2022. In 2025, new titles in this segment accounted for 9% of all PC revenue. Key releases: Schedule I (1.6% of all PC revenue), R.E.P.O. (1%), PEAK (0.6%), Dispatch (0.5%), Silksong (0.3%).
The $30-$50 MSRP segment surged 60% on PC in 2025, 99% on PlayStation, and 45% on Xbox, driven by ARC Raiders, Oblivion Remastered, Ready or Not, Helldivers 2, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. New releases account for a slight majority of revenue in this tier.
The above-$50 segment is growing on PC (+58% YoY) and PlayStation (+34% YoY), with Xbox flat. On PC, the biggest contributors were Battlefield 6 (3.9% of all 2025 revenue), EA Sports FC 26 (1.3%), and Monster Hunter Wilds (1.1%). On PlayStation, sports titles dominate: EA Sports FC and NBA 2K together accounted for 24.3% of all revenue.
Excluding annualized franchises, PC grew 32% in this segment, PlayStation grew 14%, and Xbox fell 22%.