PC Games Outselling Console Games: What This
Means for the Future of Gaming
According to a 2025 report from Epyllion, a research company led by Matthew Ball, PC gaming has significantly outperformed console gaming in recent years. As per the report, “Over the last 20 years, PC’s share of non-mobile content spending has grown from 29% to 51%. Since 2021, console spending is down 3% while PC spending is up 12%.”
Responsible for 53% of all non-mobile gaming sales (with the remaining 47% going to console gaming), PC gaming seems to be on an upward trend despite the industry as a whole having struggled in the past few years. But why exactly is that?
The changing landscape
When COVID first hit in 2020, gaming experienced a sharp rise due to the need for social distancing and the inability to leave one’s home. However, what looked like a permanent rise was merely a temporary trend that faded away just as quickly as it appeared once restrictions started to ease.
The temporary COVID gaming hype that many interpreted as the new normal led to increased costs, as studios started to hire more people, approve bigger budgets, and increase spending in general. Supported by high inflation, costs tied to game development surged dramatically, while revenue stayed mainly stagnant. This painful reality has now caught up with the rest of the industry, resulting in mass layoffs and game cancellations.
The industry as a whole suffered 8,500 layoffs in 2022, a record at the time. To put things into perspective, this figure was surpassed in the first 3 months of 2024 alone. While the hope is that the layoffs slow down in the coming years, few are optimistic enough to say they will stop completely.
There is good news, however. According to the report, players do not spend less time gaming. However, they also don’t spend more time gaming. This means that the gaming industry is now its own biggest enemy, and every new title that gets released and played takes away the playing time from another title.
But what can be done to combat this situation? According to Ball, studios must learn to be more efficient, reduce headcount, have shorter development cycles, and make important decisions faster. This includes designing more efficiently, reusing existing assets if possible, and scrapping projects earlier (and not after 6–7 years of development).
Advantages of PC gaming
While both forms of gaming have their own pros and cons, the changing landscape of gaming seems to have created a new set of challenges that may have just tipped the scales in favor of PC gaming:
Lower barrier to entry: Most families and children have or require a PC/laptop for their school/work, while not many families need a gaming console for their daily life. A console is generally regarded as a “nice-to-have,” while a PC is viewed as almost essential.
Higher competitiveness: Thanks to the mouse and keyboard, PC gaming offers higher competitiveness when compared to gaming consoles and is a preferred choice for players who engage in competitive play.
Possibility of early access: PC gamers have an option to buy and play titles that are still in development. This is beneficial for both parties: players get to test (and sometimes co-design) new titles before they are finished, while studios can test core mechanics, gain first-hand feedback that can still be addressed, and use the money earned to pay salaries.
Multitasking: PC gaming allows users to quickly switch between different windows if needed (e.g., Alt-Tab to a different window to check a tutorial video mid-game, reply to a WhatsApp message, or check whether they got lucky while playing favorite online casino games). Console gaming, on the other hand, is very one-dimensional and doesn’t offer the same level of flexibility.
Exclusive titles: Not only is the library of PC games larger than the library of all console games combined, but PC gaming also offers exclusive titles like the Roblox Premium games that an entirely new generation of players is now growing up with.
Favored by the new generation of players: With a sharp rise in games like Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox, a new generation of players is already growing up on PC gaming. Being used to PC gaming, chances are that very few of them will decide to switch to a console that will cost them hundreds of dollars.
It doesn’t help that previously console-exclusive titles like The Last of Us are now available on PC, a decision both PlayStation and Xbox made a few years back. It will be interesting to see whether the release of a new console, such as the PlayStation 6, will manage to revive at least some of the console gaming hype.
We know that Sony is already working on PS6, as evidenced by the countless leaks we’ve received over the past few months: highly focused on AI and AI-assisted rendering, cross-generation compatibility, hardware collaboration with AMD, possibly without physical disks.
However, it seems like the recent memory crisis will unfortunately postpone the process, which places the most optimistic release window toward the end of 2028, at the earliest. Given Sony’s stronger-than-expected sales and quarterly results, however, it’s becoming more and more plausible that the company will decide to prolong its PS5 lifecycle and release the new version sometime in 2029.