2025 has been a bit of a surprisingly successful year for games. After Rockstar took their ball and popped it into 2026 with a Grand Theft Auto VI delay, we all thought the year would be fine but a bit quiet. Now, it seems it'll be a record-breaking year for value for the gaming market.
This comes via a new report from the analysts at Newzoo (via PCGamer). The games industry is expected to surpass expectations and reach a mind-boggling number of $197 billion. "This represents an upward revision to earlier forecasts, driven primarily by stronger-than-expected performance on PC and mobile," said Newzoo's Tianyi Gu.
It's predicted that PC gaming will have grown by about 10.4% by the year's end, which is impressive even if the market share is still only about half of the behemoth that is mobile gaming. Console growth is also pretty solid at 4.2%, perhaps driven by the arrival of the brand-new machine the Nintendo Switch 2.
"A strong slate of premium releases outperformed last year's standout hits, reinforcing that high-quality premium content can still break through on PC despite increasing competition for attention," reads Newzoo's report regarding the PC market. The firm also made a list of the top 10 PC releases by revenue, which makes for quite the interesting little read:
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
In a time where we're still talking about layoffs and gaming being a difficult space, it's quite a hard pill to swallow that the industry is raking in so much money. Where does it all go?