Weekly Gaming Reports Recap: February 23 - February 27 (2026)
EGS annual results; Circana's US market predictions (+ January results); the UK gaming market & more.
Reports of the week:
Newzoo: Top Games of 2025 on PC & Console
Circana: The US Gaming Market Could Hit an All-Time High in 2026
Circana: The US Gaming Market in January 2026
Games & Numbers (February 11 – February 24, 2026)
Epic Games Store: 2025 Year in Review
ERA: The UK Entertainment Market in 2025
Newzoo: Top Games of 2025 on PC & Console
Top 10 PC games by Revenue
Battlefield 6 took the top spot as the best-selling PC game of 2025. ARC Raiders came in second, and Schedule I came in third (a bit unexpectedly!).
Also worth noting: R.E.P.O. and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 both made the chart. These are good examples that new IP launches on PC are still very much possible.
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Top 10 console games by Revenue
Half the chart is sports games. And that says a lot about the console audience: a meaningful chunk of PlayStation and Xbox players essentially live inside one or two sports franchises.
Beyond that, the rest of the top 10 is made up of big AA/AAA releases. Console players (setting aside Nintendo Switch) want blockbusters.
On Nintendo Switch, first-party titles continue to do the heavy lifting. That said, Newzoo analysts point out that indie and AA games that match the platform’s vibe, like Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Fantasy Life i, Tiny Bookshop, are also pulling in solid numbers.
Top 10 by MAU on PC and Console
No surprises here. The usual suspects have held their ground for the last many years: Counter-Strike 2, Roblox, Fortnite, and the rest of the live-service elite.
Circana: The US Gaming Market Could Hit an All-Time High in 2026
Key Numbers
In 2025, Americans spent $60.7 billion on video games (hardware, content, and accessories), up 1.4% from 2024.
In 2026, the market could reach $62.8 billion (+3% YoY).
The all-time record for the US market was set in 2021, when Americans spent $61.7 billion on games.
❗️Adjusted for inflation, $61.7 billion in 2021 is equivalent to $76.7 billion as of January 2026. So a nominal record is within reach, but a real-terms record is not. I used this calculator.
Key Growth Drivers
Nintendo Switch 2 became the fastest-selling home console in US history (if we’re counting the first 7 months). Circana expects sales to keep growing through 2026.
Player interest in GTA VI is at the highest level Circana has ever recorded. Analysts expect the release to drive hardware, accessories, and subscription sales.
2026 has several big releases lined up, including at least Resident Evil: Requiem, Pokémon: Pokopia, and Marvel’s Wolverine.
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Gaming subscription revenue grew in 2025, and Circana is confident that the trend will continue into 2026.
Valve’s Steam Machines could shake up the console market if priced competitively and done right.
Risks and Headwinds
Rising prices for RAM, GPUs, CPUs, and storage (driven by competition with AI data centers) could make gaming hardware less accessible or more expensive.
Younger audiences are increasingly playing on PCs and mobile devices. If hardware prices rise, those platforms will likely keep gaining ground, and cloud gaming could accelerate as well.
If prices go up due to tariffs or other factors, 38% of buyers would purchase fewer games at full price on launch day, 34% would wait for sales, and 27% would spend more time in F2P games.
Circana: The US Gaming Market in January 2026
Market numbers
In January 2026, Americans spent $4.698 billion on games, up 3% year-over-year.
Game sales grew 3% to $4.266 billion.
On the content side, subscription sales grew the most. In January 2026, they were up 23% YoY.
Console game sales grew 2%, PC game sales grew 1%, mobile was down 1%.
Hardware sales jumped 16% to $248 million.
But that hardware growth was entirely driven by Nintendo Switch 2. PS5 sales fell 17% YoY; Xbox Series S|X dropped 27%. The original Nintendo Switch collapsed 79%.
That said, PS5 was still the top-selling system in January, both by units and revenue, despite the year-over-year decline.
Accessories slipped slightly to $185 million (-5% YoY). The lowest January figure since 2020, when it was $143 million.
Game Sales
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, NBA 2K26, and Madden NFL 26 were the best-selling games of January 2026.
Only one new release cracked the top 20: Code Vein II at #11. On PC, it went straight to #1.
Fallout 4 had a strong sales bump on the back of the successful TV show, returning to the top 20.
Final Fantasy VII: Remake Intergrade jumped to #9 (from #225!) following its launch on Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series S|X.
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The top 5 grossing mobile games: MONOPOLY GO!, Royal Match, Last War: Survival, Candy Crush Saga, and Gossip Harbor.
Platform Charts
PlayStation and Xbox charts are nearly identical, with 7 out of 10 titles overlapping.
Final Fantasy VII: Remake Intergrade had a strong debut on Nintendo Switch 2, landing at #2. Pokemon Legends: Z-A took the top spot.
As mentioned above, Code Vein II topped the PC chart by revenue.
Fable Anniversary saw a notable sales spike, likely driven by the preview of the new entry in the series and a steep discount.
Games & Numbers (February 11 – February 24, 2026)
PC/Console
Arc Raiders has sold 14 million copies in 15 weeks since launch. Nexon called the Embark Studios project a “blockbuster franchise of global scale.” Peak CCU in January hit 960,000 players.
NieR: Automata has reached 10 million copies sold, nine years after launch.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has sold over 5 million copies. Sales got a boost from the release of the final DLC (Mysteria Ecclesiae) in November 2025.
Mewgenics surpassed 1 million copies sold in one week after launch. The game recouped its development costs three hours after release. The best launch in Edmund McMillen’s history.
YAPYAP, a co-op magic action game, has sold over 500,000 copies in its first week. The game asks players to cast spells by speaking into a microphone (which is fun!).
Epic Games Store: 2025 Year in Review
Platform Key Metrics
Total spending by PC players on EGS reached $1.16 billion (+6% YoY).
Spending on non-Epic games grew 57% to a record $400 million. This figure excludes revenue from Marvel Rivals, Valorant, GTA V, EA Sports FC 26, and a few others, as those developers use their own payment systems and keep 100% of revenue.
The total PC user base exceeded 317 million. Cross-platform Epic accounts are at nearly 972 million (+8%).
MAU in December 2025 hit 78 million (+6% YoY), an all-time platform record.
Average MAU for the year was 67 million (-1% YoY), average DAU was 31 million (-2% YoY).
Total time played came in at 6.65 billion hours (-14% YoY). On the other hand, time spent in third-party games grew 4% YoY to 2.78 billion hours. 35% of that time was spent in games with their own payment systems.
The EGS catalog has surpassed 6,000 games.
Free Games Program
100 free games were offered in 2025, with an average rating of 78% across all titles.
Players claimed 662 million copies of free games. The combined retail value of all those titles is $2,316.
More than 77% of games in the program set their all-time peak player record during the free giveaway week. The EGS team also notes that while a game was free on EGS, its peak concurrent players on Steam grew by 40%.
Product Updates
Starting June 2025, developers keep 100% of the first $1 million in annual revenue per product. The standard 88/12 split only kicks in after that threshold.
Epic Web Shops launched in 2025, giving developers storefronts within the Epic ecosystem. In-game content can be sold through them even if the game is not listed on EGS itself.
In 2025, the mobile EGS opened up to third-party developers.
Plans for 2026
A full overhaul of the launcher architecture is planned for the summer.
Communities, avatars, direct messaging, and voice chat are coming to EGS in Q2.
A cross-promo program with Fortnite will launch: buyers of participating games will receive Fortnite skins. Early partners include Capcom, miHoYo, Pearl Abyss, S-Game, MintRocket, and Kakao Games.
A cross-platform library for PC and mobile is planned for the fall.
Regional storefronts and localized discoverability are on the 2026 roadmap.
For the mobile EGS, Japan expansion is planned for March, Brazil for June. EGS also plans to expand API capabilities and self-publishing tools.
ERA: The UK Entertainment Market in 2025
ERA (Entertainment Retailers Association) has been publishing data on the UK music, video, and games market for 26 years. The 2025 figures are preliminary; the final numbers will be released later (usually in March).
Entertainment Market Outlook
Combined revenue across all three segments (music, video, games) reached £13.26 billion (+7.1% YoY), an all-time record.
The entertainment economy is growing 4x faster than the UK economy as a whole (GDP forecast for 2025: +1.5%).
Over the past 10 years, the entertainment market has grown by 120%, while the UK economy has grown by just 12% over the same period.
Games are outpacing average UK economic growth over the last decade by 7x, music by 10x, and video by just over 14x.
Games
Gaming revenue came in at £5.37 billion (+7.4% YoY). In 2025 alone, the market grew more than it did over the previous four years combined (2021-2024: +6.7%).
The main growth driver was mobile and tablet games, which reached £1.88 billion (+8.8% YoY).
Digital downloads of console games showed strong growth, reaching £857.6 million (+11.5% YoY).
Physical console game sales dipped to £318.9 million (-1% YoY).
Games remain the last entertainment segment where the ownership model still beats the access model: 45% of revenue comes from purchases rather than subscriptions. For comparison, that figure is 16.6% in music and 7.2% in video.
The best-selling game of the year was EA Sports FC 26, with over 1.97 million copies sold (digital + physical).
Video
Video was the largest revenue segment for the second year in a row, bringing in £5.44 billion (+8% YoY).
Streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and others) generated £4.9 billion (+8.8% YoY).
Digital sales of films and TV shows grew 7.4% to £202 million.
Physical media sales (DVD and Blu-ray) continued to decline, but the pace slowed to -4.7% YoY, the slowest drop since 2010. Blu-ray has overtaken DVD by revenue (hard to believe I’m writing this in 2026): £84.2 million vs. £64.7 million.
The best-selling film of the year was Wicked (983,000 copies), comfortably ahead of last year’s leader, Deadpool & Wolverine (562,000 copies).
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Music
Revenue reached £2.45 billion (+4.2% YoY).
Streaming subscriptions brought in £2.05 billion (+3.2% YoY).
Physical formats had the strongest growth (surprisingly!) at +11.5% YoY. Vinyl was up 18.5%, cassettes up 95% (though from a tiny base: just £4.6 million). CD sales were nearly flat (-1%).
Taylor Swift topped the charts for the second year in a row, both in albums and vinyl (642,000 albums, including 147,000 on vinyl).