2025 Games Industry Summary: Growth and 2026 Risks
2025 was another interesting year for games. While the general mood in the industry is understandably low due to layoffs, closures, and delays, the industry has seen strong growth.
Regional Growth
In terms of growth, 2025 is one of the industries most balanced. All regions saw strong growth, with only one market notably below 10% YoY.
Asia-Pacific continues to absolutely dominate the games industry with nearly 50% of all revenues. Europe and Latin America both grew well, with 10.7% and 9.6% respectively.
MENA (Middle East and Africa) showed the furthest growth in 2025 with a whopping 15% YoY, reaching 4% of global revenues.
Conversely, North America lagged behind other markets with only 5.7% growth YoY, close to one third of MENA’s.
This growth has continued mostly along trend lines and won’t have any industry-shattering effects. Devs should still focus on Asia-Pacific for localized releases, as well as for Europe and Latin America. This is effectively business as usual for the games industry of 2026, but it will be fascinating to see how this growth changes into next year. If North America continues to fall behind, it may be possible that within the next ten or twenty years we’ll see Europe become the second largest games market by region, but that’d be a long way off.
Platforms
PC hit record numbers with 12% YoY growth, the strongest year for PC on record. Stunningly, 42% of that growth came exclusively from the Chinese games market.
Mobile followed with a strong showing at 10.7% and Console at 4.2% YoY.
“Premium” titles e.g standard “Buy-to-own”, on both platforms saw good growth, with 8.1% on Console and a huge 25.3% increase on PC, bringing it to 32% of overall PC revenue.
PC and Console both saw notable shrinkage in revenue from DLC purchases. PC saw a 5.5% drop, while console saw a massive 23.4% drop in DLC revenue.
It’s worth comparing this to microtransactions which has seen very different results. Consoles saw a 4.6% drop in Microtransaction revenue, fairly similar to PC’s DLC drop. PC microtransaction revenues are wildly different, showing a 9.1% increase YoY in revenue.
It’s interesting to ponder this change in revenue as it reveals some interesting problems with DLC vs microtransactions in the current games industry. While microtransactions are often, arguably, the most expensive investment a player can make in a game (e.g buying a single character skin for £10), DLC content must justify its cost against the original fee for the game in many cases. It’s typical to see Steam reviews for DLCs mentioning things similar to “if the DLC is half the cost of the full game, it should have half the content”. Players don’t seem to apply the same logic when the game is free-to-play. For a quick example, Fortnite skins can cost between $13 - $18 USD each (Source), enough to purchase an entire DLC for pay-to-play titles.
Players often expect games to be supported for multiple years post-release, but the lack of revenue from DLCs makes this a more difficult conversation for developers. Certain markets, like China, are often discussed as being unfriendly to DLC but on board with microtransactions, so perhaps this is more of a cultural shift within the industry itself.
For the final piece in this puzzle, “Subscriptions” on consoles rose by 11.7% YoY, up to 21% of all console revenue. PC’s “In-Game Subscriptions” rose by an almost unbelievable 42.1%, but with that totalling just 4% of total PC revenues.
Note: It’s worth highlighting the different vernacular used in Newzoo’s results, for consoles “Subscriptions” is pointing to the platform-specific services e.g PS+ and Xbox Game Pass. With PC, “In-game Subscriptions” is focused more on battle passes for games like Apex Legends, Arc Raiders, and other similar titles.
To summarize:
Consoles
- Good growth for full price/premium titles
- Small drop in Microtransaction revenue
- Notable drop in DLC revenue
- Fair increase in Subscription revenues
PC
- Impressive growth for full price/premium titles
- Small drop in DLC revenue
- Notable increase in Microtransaction revenue
- Strong increase in In-game Subscription revenues
What are the deciding factors for 2026 revenues?
It feels like every platform currently has its own set of specific challenges. Let’s quickly dive into each platform and look at what factors will dictate their growth in H2 2026:
PC
PC gaming has been in a tough spot for the last couple of years due to Hardware shortages. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon. RAM, GPUs, and other hardware is still prohibitively high, putting new PC gamers off from investing in new setups. It’s even being discussed currently that the shortage is even worse than realised, with costs set to continue increasing over the next year.
With that said, this is only a limiting factor for brand new releases or those with completely out of date setups. The vast majority of PC gaming time is spent on games released pre-2026, meaning players with existing viable setups likely won’t need to upgrade. With PC arguably lacking a huge release in 2026, revenues may stay consistent through Indie, AA, and pre-2026 AAA titles.
“64% of 2025 PC playtime went to pre-2019 titles” - Newzoo
Consoles
Consoles are in an even stranger place than PC. With recent news, there’s not much faith in either of the major platform holders, and the Switch 2 is still lacking a platform-seller (like how the Switch had Breath of The Wild). It’s worth noting here that all three platform holders have increased prices in the last twelve months.
GTA VI is the big console mover of 2026, it’s the main opportunity for consoles to pull relevance back from PC, increase install bases, and position themselves for a stronger 2027 outlook. At this stage it seems extremely unlikely that GTA VI will be pushed back, though if it was it would severely damage the chance of growth for consoles. The more tangible risk at this stage is that GTA VI acts as a standalone success, drawing players but not expanding their horizons to other titles on the platform or further investment.
As GTA VI’s PC release isn’t expected until late 2027 at earliest, more likely 2028, it could have a migratory effect for PC players. It’s going to be fascinating to see how consoles finish 2026, and whether GTA VI will bring the players they’re desperately seeking.
Mobile
Mobile hardware shipments dropped 6% YoY in Q1 of 2026. This isn’t surprising, both given the state of global economies and incomes, as well as the lack of need for new hardware – in general phones aren’t grabbing people’s attention in the way they did in the 2010s. This is mostly due to a lack of innovation in each iteration, with many people no longer feeling the need to have the latest model.
This likely won’t affect mobile dramatically as mobile games have long understood they need to run on every device, accounting for players who don’t regularly upgrade. Mobile isn’t likely to see as much disruption as PC or console, which is fairly typical.
Despite how it can feel in the industry, 2025 was a strong year for games. 2026 has already shown that the bad news didn’t end last year but we can hope industry growth and growing revenues will help reverse layoffs and closures as we go into 2027.
If you’re interested in growing your revenues, getting your games to players around the world, and importantly into the hands of Chinese gamers, get in touch with ECI Games today: info@ecigames.net