Earlier in the present day, Matthew Ball, CEO of funding technique agency Epyllion, launched an early model of a presentation referred to as “The State of Video Gaming in 2025.” The slideshow, which contains knowledge from market analysis companies like IDG, Newzoo, and Circana, summarizes worldwide market tendencies within the gaming business. I will be trustworthy: Issues aren’t nice. Following a decade-long progress wave between 2011 and 2021, the business’s income progress has stalled, feeding into an environment of threat aversion and stagnating funding.
The outlook is not totally dire, nevertheless. Whereas gaming business income progress has plateaued during the last three years, Epyllion’s evaluation says PC gaming is “a brilliant spot” of continued progress, now accounting for almost all of non-mobile content material income.
Based on Epyllion, each PC and console gaming are—as you might have seen—significantly larger considerations than they have been on the flip of the 2010s. In 2024, shoppers have been spending nearly $50 billion extra on PC and console video games than they have been in 2011.
However starting in 2021, console gaming progress began to sluggish, which is especially clear in worldwide Xbox Collection S/X and PlayStation 5 console gross sales. In comparison with the earlier console era, the present Microsoft and Sony console strains had, after 49 months, bought practically 7 million fewer techniques.
PC gaming, in the meantime, has solely continued to develop. “Whereas console has stagnated since 2021,” Epyllion says, PC gaming income “has grown 20%.”
Epyllion attributes PC gaming’s continued progress to “many compounding benefits over the console ecosystem,” like a extra intensive launch library with larger backwards compatibility, extra speedy entry to net browsers, social platforms, and livestream software program suites, and better top-end efficiency.
What’s extra, Epyllion says PC gaming’s “momentum remains to be rising,” because of cross-releases of console exclusives, developments in moveable PC gaming gadgets like SteamOS, and, properly, Roblox. “Lots of of tens of millions of youngsters rising up on Roblox are unlikely to ask for a $500 console to play AAA video games,” Epyllion says.
As promising as Epyllion’s outlook is for PC gaming, it is value noting that there is not a common consensus on who’s received a much bigger market share between consoles and PC. For instance, in August 2023, Newzoo reported that console video games had attracted $56.1 billion in shopper spending in comparison with round $40 billion for PC video games. For an evidence of what may account for the discrepancy, we reached out to Matthew Ball for remark.
“IDG is usually thought of the supply of document for gross sales monitoring within the business, which is why I primarily deferred to their estimate,” Ball informed PC Gamer through electronic mail. “When you have a look at Pelham Smithers, a personal analysis company/financial institution within the UK, which is what Monetary Instances often makes use of, and what Bloomberg makes use of (and truly places by way of the Bloomberg Terminal), they really have PC as 50% bigger than console. IDC is comparatively near IDG, however not equivalent.”
Finally, Ball mentioned, “there’s some disagreement.” Ball’s principle is that market researchers may range of their monitoring of recreation gross sales in China—which, he says, are “largely PC on the AA/AAA degree.” In Epyllion’s evaluation, Ball mentioned he “deferred to the place publishers informed me I ought to right here, after which cross-referenced with a number of different sources similar to IDC and Bloomberg.”
As for PC gaming’s future, Ball mentioned he is assured in Epyllion’s outlining of the PC gaming market’s “nonetheless intensifying” progress benefits. “I imagine that deeply,” Ball mentioned, “particularly if/as Steam extends to front room and handheld.”
