PC Gaming Is Having A Record Breaking Year
2025 might feel chaotic in a lot of ways, but for PC gaming the numbers are looking very good. Market analyst firm Newzoo expects the global games market to hit about 197 billion dollars in 2025, with overall growth of 7.5 percent year on year.
The big surprise is how strong PC gaming has been. While mobile still quietly dominates total revenue, Newzoo says PC gaming is on track to grow by a huge 10.4 percent this year, bringing in around 43 billion dollars on its own.
That is a strong sign that PC gaming is not just alive, it is thriving. Despite live service titles, subscriptions and free to play models competing for attention, traditional full price games are still doing serious business.
Premium PC Games Are Driving Growth
Newzoo points to a strong line up of premium releases as the main reason PC revenue is climbing so fast. Premium here simply means games you pay for up front instead of free to play titles with microtransactions as the core model.
According to Newzoo, these full price releases outperformed the big hits of 2024, proving that if you bring high quality content to PC, players will still happily pay day one. The company shared its list of the top 10 PC releases of 2025 by revenue:
- Battlefield 6
- Schedule 1
- Arc Raiders
- Monster Hunter Wilds
- Borderlands 4
- EA FC 26
- REPO
- The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered
- Sid Meier's Civilization 7
- Dune Awakening
Every game in this top 10 is a premium title. That is important because it shows the PC audience is still very willing to buy full releases instead of relying only on free games and battle passes. It is also not just massive triple A publishers winning here. Newzoo notes that AA and indie projects like Schedule 1, Arc Raiders, REPO and Dune Awakening all made the cut, giving smaller and mid sized studios a solid presence in the revenue charts.
Some names on the list are more surprising than others. Monster Hunter Wilds ranks highly despite struggling with post launch issues and reports of sales dropping off after the initial surge. Civilization 7 is another eye catcher. Its launch reception was mixed, but clearly the fantasy of rewriting history is still powerful enough to move a lot of copies.
Meanwhile one of the biggest franchises in gaming is missing: Call of Duty. That absence is not going unnoticed. After a weaker than usual launch for Black Ops 7, Activision and Microsoft have already reacted by moving away from the pattern of yearly back to back Modern Warfare and Black Ops releases. Even so, analyst firm Circana still has Black Ops 7 sitting at seventh place in total sales across PC and consoles, so the series is far from dead. It just could not crack the PC specific top 10 this year.
What PC Gamers Are Actually Playing
Revenue tells one story. Player time tells another. When Newzoo looks at monthly active users on PC, the ranking is dominated by the usual live service giants that have been holding on to players for years.
Games like Counter Strike 2, Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite and Valorant continue to fill the top spots. These titles are built around long term progression, regular updates and social play, so they are perfect for players looking for a game to sink hundreds or thousands of hours into.
Rounding out that list is Peak, a co op focused title that highlights another truth about modern PC gaming. A lot of us are simply looking for excuses to hang out with friends online. Whether that means sweating through competitive matches or laughing as everyone falls off cliffs together, social experiences keep people logging in.
Put together, these trends show a clear split in how PC gamers spend their money versus their time. Premium single purchase games are doing a lot of the heavy lifting for revenue growth, while free to play and live service titles still dominate day to day engagement.
What This Means For PC Gamers
For anyone building or upgrading a gaming PC, this is good news. Strong PC revenue growth encourages publishers and developers to continue treating PC as a priority platform rather than an afterthought. That often means better optimization, more graphics options and more games taking advantage of powerful GPUs and CPUs instead of targeting only lower end hardware.
It also means more variety. With both massive triple A series and smaller AA or indie projects finding success in the premium space, PC players can expect a wider range of experiences, from cinematic shooters like Battlefield 6 to hardcore co op titles and strategy heavy games like Civilization 7.
At the same time, the continued dominance of live service games in active users means your existing library is not going away anytime soon. Competitive shooters, sandbox builders and social hubs will keep receiving updates, new seasons and fresh content to keep your rig busy between big launches.
If 2025 is any indication, PC gaming is not just stable, it is on an upswing. Premium games are proving their worth, long running service titles are holding strong, and analysts are revising their forecasts upward thanks to the performance of PC and mobile. For PC gamers, that adds up to more games to play, more reasons to care about performance, and plenty of justification for keeping an eye on your next hardware upgrade.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/analyst-firm-says-the-games-market-is-expected-to-reach-a-record-breaking-usd197-billion-by-the-end-of-2025-driven-primarily-by-stronger-than-expected-performance-on-pc-and-mobile/
