Earlier right now, Matthew Ball, CEO of funding technique agency Epyllion, launched an early model of a presentation known as “The State of Video Gaming in 2025.” The slideshow, which includes knowledge from market analysis corporations like IDG, Newzoo, and Circana, summarizes worldwide market developments within the gaming business. I’ll be sincere: Things 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 danger aversion and stagnating funding.
The outlook is not completely dire, nevertheless. While gaming business income progress has plateaued during the last three years, Epyllion’s evaluation says PC gaming is “a vivid spot” of continued progress, now accounting for almost all of non-mobile content material income.
According to Epyllion, each PC and console gaming are—as you’ll have observed—significantly larger issues than they had been on the flip of the 2010s. In 2024, shoppers had been spending virtually $50 billion extra on PC and console video games than they had been in 2011.
But starting in 2021, console gaming progress began to sluggish, which is especially clear in worldwide Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5 console gross sales. Compared to the earlier console era, the present Microsoft and Sony console traces had, after 49 months, offered practically 7 million fewer techniques.
PC gaming, in the meantime, has solely continued to develop. “While 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 in depth launch library with higher backwards compatibility, extra rapid entry to internet browsers, social platforms, and livestream software program suites, and better top-end efficiency.
What’s extra, Epyllion says PC gaming’s “momentum continues to be rising,” due to cross-releases of console exclusives, developments in transportable PC gaming gadgets like SteamOS, and, properly, Roblox. “Hundreds of thousands and thousands 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 acquired 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 client spending in comparison with round $40 billion for PC video games. For an evidence of what would possibly account for the discrepancy, we reached out to Matthew Ball for remark.
“IDG is usually thought-about the supply of report for gross sales monitoring within the business, which is why I primarily deferred to their estimate,” Ball instructed PC Gamer through e-mail. “If you take a look at Pelham Smithers, a personal analysis company/financial institution within the UK, which is what Financial Times normally makes use of, and what Bloomberg makes use of (and truly places by means of the Bloomberg Terminal), they really have PC as 50% bigger than console. IDC is comparatively near IDG, however not equivalent.”
Ultimately, Ball stated, “there’s some disagreement.” Ball’s idea is that market researchers would possibly fluctuate of their monitoring of sport gross sales in China—which, he says, are “largely PC on the AA/AAA degree.” In Epyllion’s evaluation, Ball stated he “deferred to the place publishers instructed me I ought to right here, after which cross-referenced with a number of different sources comparable to IDC and Bloomberg.”
As for PC gaming’s future, Ball stated he is assured in Epyllion’s outlining of the PC gaming market’s “nonetheless intensifying” progress benefits. “I consider that deeply,” Ball stated, “particularly if/as Steam extends to front room and handheld.”
