In standard conception, the gamer is a person preoccupied with digital conquest—in shooters, in MOBAs, or in another format permitting for what the ancients as soon as known as “pwning,” earlier than the time period was rightfully culled from widespread parlance. PC gamers, nonetheless, aren’t as preoccupied with PvP. In response to trade analysts, Steam customers are extra doubtless than console gamers to play noncompetitive video games, and that curiosity retains rising.
In its 2025 report on video games trade tendencies, market analysis firm Newzoo had surveyed “uncooked telemetry knowledge taken from over 1 million gamers” to match gameplaying tendencies on totally different platforms. Inspecting the video games that every participant in its dataset had performed at the very least two hours of, Newzoo stated that 58% of the video games performed by Steam customers in 2024 had been completely noncompetitive PvE video games, in comparison with 42% of video games performed on PlayStation and 41% of video games performed on Xbox.
Newzoo’s knowledge reveals that Steam person curiosity in PvE video games has seen regular yearly will increase, rising from 47% in 2021.
Newzoo attributes the “more and more extra PvE-friendly” Steam userbase to the rising recognition of what it calls “social-focused titles.” The terminology’s a bit clunky, but it surely would not appear inaccurate whenever you rely what number of breakout hits lately—like Helldivers 2, Deadly Firm, and extra lately Schedule 1—have been targeted totally on jolly cooperative mayhem.
I believe the variations in platform choices play a task right here, too. Steam has a decrease barrier to entry for smaller builders, offering PC gamers a wider breadth of indie video games that—whereas incomparably bizarre and delightful—usually tend to be made on tighter budgets that may’t as simply accommodate the extra improvement and networking prices of aggressive multiplayer.
There are some asterisks on the information that bear mentioning. For one factor, it would not look like Newzoo’s survey differentiates between singleplayer and multiplayer video games; calling a singleplayer sport a PvE sport is not improper, but it surely does really feel somewhat redundant. These charts additionally do not evaluate playtime; a participant might need performed a better variety of PvE video games whereas spending extra hours total in PvP video games.
Extra of notice, nonetheless, is that Newzoo’s panel would not embody participant knowledge from China and India. It is protected to say that with out participant metrics from the Chinese language and Indian markets, which collectively comprise greater than a billion individuals enjoying video video games, Newzoo’s panel is not completely consultant of worldwide gaming preferences.
Curiously, Newzoo famous that throughout all three platforms, the extra video games somebody performs in a 12 months, the extra doubtless it’s that the video games they’re enjoying are PvE titles. However whereas the rise is a extra gradual one on each consoles, Steam gamers present “a notable hockey stick impact,” the place the probability of noncompetitive curiosity jumps dramatically as quickly as a Steam participant is enjoying a couple of sport a 12 months.
To me, there’s an intuitive logic to these numbers. Whereas PC gaming has grown extra approachable within the final decade, it is nonetheless a extra fanatic market. Aggressive video games have the broadest market attraction, so these are the video games somebody is more likely to choose up in the event that they solely play one or two video games in a 12 months. PvE video games are those extra more likely to be filling fan wikis and user-made spreadsheets penned by devoted weirdos.
For gamers who dangle up their Discord chat with their Marvel Rivals crew and instantly go searching for sicko stuff to play, PC stays vacation spot primary.
