A new report says PC games are outselling console games, calling PC gaming a “bright spot” in a troubled industry.
Earlier today, Matthew Ball, CEO of investment firm Epyllion, released an early version of a presentation titled “The State of Video Games in 2025.” The slideshow, including data from research companies such as IDG, Newzoo and Circana, summarizes the trends in the global gaming industry market. I’ll be honest: things aren’t looking good. After a decade-long wave of growth, industry revenue growth stagnated between 2011 and 2021, creating an environment of risk aversion and stagnant investment.
Prospects are not fully terrible, though. While gaming industry revenue growth has stabilized over the past three years, Epyllion’s analysis shows that PC gaming is a “bright spot” of continued growth and now accounts for the majority of non-mobile content revenue.
According to Epilion, gaming on both PC and consoles, as you may have noticed, is a much bigger concern than it was at the turn of the 2010s. In 2024, consumers spent nearly $50 billion more on PC and console games than in 2011.
But starting in 2021, console gaming growth began to slow, most notably in global sales of the Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5 consoles. Compared to the previous generation of consoles, the current Microsoft and Sony console lines sold nearly 7 million systems in 49 months. less.
Meanwhile, the computer games market continues to grow. “Although the console industry has been stagnant since 2021,” Epilion says, PC gaming revenues are “up 20%.”
Epyllion attributes the continued growth of PC gaming to “many comprehensive benefits over the console ecosystem”, such as a larger library of releases with greater backward compatibility, faster access to web browsers, social platforms and live streaming software packages, and higher performance at the highest level.
What’s more, Epilion says the “momentum” of PC gaming is “still growing” thanks to cross-releases of console exclusives, advances in portable PC gaming devices like SteamOS, and, well, Roblox. “The hundreds of millions of kids who grew up on Roblox aren’t likely to ask for a $500 console to play AAA games,” Epilion says.
As promising as Epyllion’s prospects are for PC gaming, it’s worth noting that there’s no consensus on who will have the most market share between consoles and PC. For example, in August 2023, Newzoo reported that console games attracted $56.1 billion in consumer spending, compared to about $40 billion for PC games. To explain what may be causing the discrepancy, we have reached out to Matthew Ball for comment.
“IDG is generally considered the industry’s sales tracking data source, so I relied primarily on their assessment,” Ball told PC Gamer via email. “If you look at Pelham Smithers, a private research agency/bank in the UK that typically uses the Financial Times and what Bloomberg uses (and actually runs through the Bloomberg terminal), they actually have 50% more PCs than consoles. .IDC is relatively close to IDG, but not identical.”
Ultimately, Ball said, “there is some disagreement.” Ball’s theory is that market researchers may have different ways of tracking game sales in China, which he says are “mostly AAA/AAA PC.” In Epyllion’s analysis, Ball said he “went to what the publishers told me and then cross-referenced several other sources such as IDC and Bloomberg.”
As for the future of PC gaming, Ball said he was confident in Epyllion’s description of the “still accelerating” benefits of growth in the PC gaming market. “I believe in that deeply,” Ball said, “especially if Steam expands into the living room and into portable devices.”