Ben Porter, Newzoo's director of consulting, took to the GDC stage yesterday to address some of the findings in the analyst firm’s State Of PC & Console Gaming in 2025 report. The full report won’t be available until April 8th but some of the conclusions were discussed this week in San Francisco.

The company predicts single-digit growth in revenue to 2027, with some important caveats: while PC revenue creeps up by 2.6% (double the growth of last year) the real winner is console, which is expected to surge ahead by 7% after a period of decline between 2021 and 2024.

But the talk confirmed it’s a challenging market for new launches, as it's increasingly difficult for new games to break through, especially for smaller or indie titles trying to capture player attention. New IPs are at a distinct disadvantage in this mature market, and game launches aren't creating new players, but instead are "peeling hours away" from existing games. It's a zero-sum competition for player time.

To get some context on that, we sat down privately with Porter and his Newzoo colleague, Michiel Buijsman, principal market analyst, and asked them directly how hard the PC market looks in the year ahead.

“New launches are having to push harder than ever. So many games are launching and are sort-of dead within six months,” confirmed Porter. “You don't have new games meeting new players anymore. It's as simple as that. You have new games that are launching and having to carve out time against their incumbents effectively.”

Where does the time go?

Part of the challenge is that players are committed to evergreen games. The report shows that 67% of playtime goes on PC games over six years old. This is a rise on last year, but the reason for that is that last year PC wasn’t separated out, and the console playtime brought it down.

“Last year we had aggregated PC and console together in a lump. This time we broke it apart,” explains Porter. “What we saw was that probably the collective lump last year would have been a little bit lower, because on PlayStation and Xbox, it was below 50% whereas on PC, it was above 60%. So that evens down a little bit. But when you pull PC out by itself, you realise PC is quite different. If you think about it, every major game on PC is in some degree of maturity.”

On PC, only 8% of playtime is spent on new games, with Helldivers 2 at 1.3% being the winner. Marvel Rivals is another one to watch. Porter notes: “Let's see what that what happens with that next year. It only launched in December, and it was already in our top five for hours played for new games.”

Michiel Buijsman adds that it’s important to make a distinction between premium games and free-to-play. “The hours on PC were flat. Revenues are relatively stagnant,” he says. “Helldivers 2 did well, but there were more premium titles and they were shorter. What you're seeing is [premium titles] monetised up front and got the revenue in, but there were also a lower price: $20 to $40 titles. So that's why the time spent on premium titles generally is lower compared to those free-to-play titles.” He says that the force at work here is that there’s an audience willing to spend on a short pay-to-play title before moving back to their go-to free social title.

Games people play

But how many games do we really play? The average number of titles a person plays annually on Steam declined since 2021, although it rebounded a little in 2024 to a more normal level. Gamers on average played 10 titles in 2024.

During the pandemic, PC gamers enjoyed 14 games a year on average. The anomaly was 2023, when the average PC gamer played just eight games. Could that be because the top games were so long that year? “The numbers came down from 14 in 2021 to down in 2022 and then down further in 2023, and 2023 was the mystery,” says Ben Porter. “We think it might be because of the titles. So you had Baldur’s Gate, Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo. Elden Ring was still being played from its 2022 launch. At least three or four very big titles sucked in a lot of play time in aggregate."

The proportion of players engaging with many games in a year is decreasing. Porter noted that the percentage of players playing more than 11 games per year is coming down, with a pullback observed on Steam (and PlayStation) in 2024. This suggests players are becoming more selective or focused on fewer games, which has implications for game developers and publishers trying to attract and retain players.

The cohort of gamers who are playing fewer than three games a year is growing. Meanwhile the cohort who are playing over 11 games a year is shrinking. “That's important,” says Porter, “because if you're launching a game, no matter what game it is, these look like behaviours that are calcified. People aren't going to buy a lot of games. So if you're able to be the one game that they play a year, that's great, and something like a Grand Theft Auto VI has the star power to expect to be that one game per year! But if you don't have that star power, it's going to be harder to launch into that part of the audience.”

 

The report also looks at the types of game, whether premium or free-to-play service. "If you play one game per year, there's a 58% chance that game is paid for," Porter told the audience. "If you play 30 games in a year, there's an 83% chance those games are free-to-play." 

“We looked at player behaviours on Steam, and the differences from playing one game in a year to whether you play 30 games in a year,” adds Porter when we sit down with him afterwards. “The genre mix is particularly interesting. Gamers playing just one game a year: it's almost a 50% likelihood that game will be a shooter on Steam.”

He continues: “The phenomenon we saw is that the number of people playing more than 11 games a year was shrinking. Not only is the number of people playing fewer and fewer games growing, but you're shrinking the number of people that are playing more games! Those people who are playing multiple games: they're playing a wide variety of genres. So those genres you would be launching into may actually be consolidating or shrinking. That’s one very important observation [for game makers] – it's a conundrum for launch.”

Price, discounts and deals

Michiel Buijsman agrees, and also notes, “There is a more cost-conscious audience on PC. There’s spending on hardware, but they're waiting on discounts on Steam, the deals, and that puts downward pressure on that revenue forecast.”

Discussion about discounting data was not included in the stage presentation last week but Buijsman and Porter are happy to talk to PC Games Insider about it in our private chat. 

“We have data on the effectiveness of discounting on Steam,” confirms Porter. “We were able, through our tool Business Store Intelligence, to see how Steam publishers hook their page up; it aggregates all of their metrics that help them optimise their store front. We get to see their actuals, and we don't publish them anywhere, but we use them to feed into our algorithms to make better estimates. We can actually see what's happening for these games.”

Newzoo can poll over 4000 games across two kinds of sales: global, like the Steam Summer Sale, and individual game sales that publisher’s organise themselves. Discounting is important for driving visibility of a game, and putting a game on sale is a key motivator for people who have wishlisted your game to purchase it. Individual game discounts have traditionally been better at driving visibility that Steam-wide sales: about 37 times better in 2019.

 

“That number has rapidly come down to just seven times better in 2024,” reveals Porter. “So it's 20% as effective today to have an individual game discount as it was in 2019 in terms of driving your impressions on average. That's a massive drop.

“And if you take that and draw a line on that same chart, it correlates directly with the number of games that are launching on Steam. In 2019 there were around 8,000 games launched on Steam. In 2025, that will be 19,000 games launched on Steam. We've multiplied the number of games per year by two and a half. All while the understanding how discounting drives visibility and player acquisition is more professional.”

Their takeaway here is that if you're trying to be found and discovered on Steam and discounting is your tool for that, “you're hooped – you’re toast”.

Today you really have to have a different media mix strategy: you have to promote through multiple channels, finding gamers off-platform. You can't just rely on making a good game - it needs to be found by an audience. The pair name “community management”, especially pre-launch, and “offshore traffic through social media and creative marketing campaigns elsewhere to attract an engaged community before launch or at launch” as strategies going forward.

The full report

Looking ahead, what about that single-digit revenue growth on PC (especially in light of console predicted to be greater at 7%)? Those numbers are what Newzoo expect to see from 2024 to 2027, and the projected console spend is elevated because of the incoming Switch 2, and the fact that GTA VI will be on consoles first before arriving on PC. “PC doesn't really have that sort of concept of a ‘generation’ really,” says Porter. “You can still use older graphics hardware to play games into the future. It's not like a step function. It's more just a sort of smooth line.”

The full report is expected on 8th April, with more game-level insight and rankings, extended playtime analysis, a deep-dive into playing preferences, Steam trends, and an analysis of how major live service games are using their own histories as engagement drivers. You can pre-register at the Newzoo site now for a preview.