Gaming Industry Statistics 2026: Genre Saturation, Revenue, and Underserved Markets
Quick answer
Newzoo forecasts $208.2 billion in global games revenue for 2026, following $197 billion in 2025, which grew 7.5% year on year. Mobile leads at roughly $108 billion, console sits near $45 billion, and PC at $43 billion is the fastest growing of the three at +10.4%.
The first half of 2026 is already on the books, and it says something sharper than any forecast. Steam grossed a record $11.1 billion in H1 2026, up 14.5% (Alinea Analytics, July 2026). But the share of that revenue coming from new releases fell to 21%, down from 29% in H1 2024. The platform is growing on its back catalogue.
Mobile went the other way. Game in-app purchase revenue was $20.4 billion in Q1 2026, up just 0.5%, while downloads fell 11.9%. Across all app categories IAP grew 9.3% (Sensor Tower, May 2026). Games are losing share of mobile spend to everything else.
The 2026 story is not saturation. It is that the money is growing while the newcomer's share of it shrinks.
How big is the games market in 2026?
Newzoo forecasts $208.2 billion for 2026, rising to $227.2 billion by 2028, after $197 billion in 2025 at 7.5% growth (Newzoo via PocketGamer.biz, December 2025). Newzoo attributed the 2025 result to "stronger-than-expected performance on PC and mobile" (PC Gamer).
The revision behind that number is the more useful fact. Newzoo's own earlier forecast for the same year was $188.8 billion:
| 2025 revenue | YoY growth |
|---|---|
| $188.8B | +3.4% |
| $197B | +7.5% |
The market beat its own forecast by roughly $8 billion and grew at more than double the predicted rate. If you built a 2025 plan on $188.8B, your model understated the market by the size of a mid-cap publisher.
The $188.8B figure is still circulating in decks and articles. It is not wrong. It is superseded. Most figures in your competitors' decks are in one of those two states, and the deck never says which.
Why do the market-size figures disagree?
Search for the size of the games industry and you will find numbers from $82 billion to over $600 billion. They are not contradicting each other. They are counting different things.
The clearest example is mobile in 2025:
| Source | Mobile games, 2025 | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Newzoo | ~$108B | All mobile game revenue |
| Sensor Tower | $82B (IAP: $81.75B) | In-app purchases on tracked app stores |
Same year, same platform, $26 billion apart, and both are correct. Sensor Tower tracks app-store IAP. Newzoo's definition is wider. Quote either one without saying which, and you have misled someone by $26 billion.
The same problem at the whole-market level:
| Source | Figure | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Newzoo | $197B (2025), $208.2B (2026) | Games software and services. Excludes hardware. |
| Sensor Tower | $94B revenue, 52B downloads (2025) | Tracked app-store activity |
| Midia Research | ~$236.9B | Includes hardware. |
| Grand View Research | $298.98B (2024) to $600.74B by 2030, 12.2% CAGR | Includes hardware, broader sector definition. |
| Mordor Intelligence | $289.73B (2025) to $593.35B by 2031, 12.68% CAGR | Includes hardware. |
Newzoo's 7.5% and Grand View's 12.2% CAGR are both defensible. One tracks what players spend on games. The other tracks the entire category, consoles and accessories included.
This breaks things at greenlight. A 12.2% CAGR lifted from a hardware-inclusive report and dropped into a pitch implies a software market growing at a rate it is not growing at. Nobody lied. The scope fell off between the report and the slide.
Three things before you quote a market figure: the firm, the publication date, and the scope.
What has 2026 shown so far?
Forecasts are useful. Six months of actuals are better. Here is what the first half of 2026 delivered.
Steam had its best half-year ever, and new games got less of it
Steam grossed $11.1 billion in H1 2026, up 14.5% year on year and 8% above H2 2025, a half that normally carries the holiday and year-end sales (Alinea Analytics, 9 July 2026). For scale, H1 2026 alone out-earned the whole of 2020 and came within touching distance of all of pandemic-peak 2021 ($11.4B), in half the time. It is 4.7x the size of H1 2017.
Then the number that should change your planning:
| Share of Steam revenue from that year's new releases | |
|---|---|
| H1 2024 | 29% |
| H1 2025 | 27% |
| H1 2026 | 21% |
The back catalogue went from 71% to 79% of the platform's revenue in two years. Steam is growing, and a shrinking slice of that growth is reaching new games.
Alinea attributes the H1 surge to five things: an influx of Asian players, particularly from China; higher pricing on new releases; the viral success of co-op games; better back-catalogue strategy from major publishers; and third-party publishers returning to Steam after failed experiments with their own launchers.
The top-earning new releases of H1 2026:
| Game | Revenue | Copies |
|---|---|---|
| Forza Horizon 6 | $197.7M | 3.5M |
| Resident Evil Requiem | $194.5M | 3.4M |
| Crimson Desert | $190M+ | - |
| Slay the Spire 2 | $141.7M | 7.1M |
| Subnautica 2 | $133.6M | - |
Slay the Spire 2 sold twice as many units as Forza Horizon 6 and earned about 70% as much. Roughly $20 a copy against roughly $56. Both are on the same list. Price point is a strategy, not a consequence, and reach and revenue are different games.
Mobile stalled, and games lost ground to everything else
Q1 2026 mobile game IAP revenue was $20.4 billion, up 0.5%. Downloads were 11.9 billion, down 11.9% (Sensor Tower, May 2026).
The comparison that matters: total mobile IAP across all app categories grew 9.3% to $43.5 billion in the same quarter. Games are flat while the store around them grows. This continues a trend that broke a long-standing pattern in September 2025, when non-game apps out-earned games in IAP for the first time, $4.8B against $4.5B (AppMagic, February 2026).
Genre revenue in Q1 2026 rotated hard:
| Genre | Q1 2026 revenue YoY |
|---|---|
| Board | +23% |
| Puzzle | +21% |
| Shooter | +12% |
| Action, RPG, Casino | declining |
Downloads fell almost everywhere, with strategy and puzzle the most resilient. iOS game revenue declined year on year while Google Play ticked up slightly, and Google Play shed 1.5 billion downloads.
Regionally: the US grew 3% but recorded its second consecutive quarterly decline, the UK grew 20%, India and Indonesia grew modestly, and Africa showed strong download growth.
The people making the games
The GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry survey (2,300+ professionals, January 2026) found 28% had been laid off in the past two years, rising to 33% in the US. Half said their employer had conducted layoffs in the past 12 months. Two-thirds of respondents at AAA studios reported layoffs at their company, against one-third at indie studios.
On generative AI, sentiment moved decisively: 52% now say it is having a negative impact, up from 30% a year earlier and 18% the year before that. Only 7% say positive, down from 13%. The most unfavourable groups are visual and technical art (64%), game design and narrative (63%), and programming (59%).
What H1 2026 adds up to: record platform revenue, a shrinking share of it going to new work, a mobile market where games are the laggard, and a workforce a quarter of which has been laid off inside two years. Growth and precarity are not in tension here. They are the same fact viewed from two ends.
Which platforms actually earn the money?
Newzoo's revised 2025 platform split:
| Platform | 2025 revenue | YoY growth |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile | ~$108B | +7.7%, a second consecutive year of growth |
| Console | ~$45B | +4.2% |
| PC | ~$43B | +10.4%, fastest of the three |
Source: Newzoo, December 2025.
PC is the growth story and console is the laggard, despite Nintendo's Switch 2 and a strong release slate. 2026 PC and console report forecasts PC revenue overtaking console by 2028 on a 6.6% CAGR against console's 4.4%, with combined PC and console software rising from $88.3B in 2025 to $103.7B by 2028. Steam's H1 2026 result is consistent with that trajectory.
The same report notes the $30 to $50 mid-price tier grew 60% on PC, 99% on PlayStation and 45% on Xbox between 2022 and 2025. The premium market did not collapse into free-to-play. It found a middle. Slay the Spire 2's 7.1 million copies in H1 2026 is that thesis with a receipt attached.
The PC and console report figures come from a Newzoo whitepaper distributed via InvestGame and are unconfirmed against Newzoo's own page.
A roadmap treating PC as the default aims at roughly 22% of global spend. That can be exactly right. It should be a decision, not a default. For how platform choice drives your economics, see game monetization.
How many games launched, and how many got noticed?
Steam's 2025 release count depends on who is counting and how they handle delisted and re-released apps:
| Source | 2025 Steam releases |
|---|---|
| SteamDB (via 80.lv) | over 19,000 |
| Alinea Analytics | ~20,000 |
| Chris Zukowski | 20,282 |
Pick one and stay with it. Do not mix them.
What happened to those releases:
- Nearly half finished 2025 with fewer than 10 reviews. About 2,200 got no reviews at all, and roughly 7,100 peaked at nine or fewer (80.lv, citing SteamDB, December 2025).
- Only about 1,200 games, roughly 6.2%, passed 500 reviews (same source).
- 608 of 20,282 reached 1,000 reviews, about 3% (Chris Zukowski, via GamesRadar).
- Only about 300 games earned more than $1 million (Alinea Analytics, December 2025).
And yet Steam had its best year ever, at roughly $20 billion gross in 2025 (Alinea Analytics, July 2026). Indie titles contributed $4.5 billion (Alinea, December 2025).
The distribution is the point
The median gross revenue for a Steam game in 2025 was $249, about $174 after Valve's cut:
| Threshold | Share of games |
|---|---|
| Under $1,000 | 66% |
| Under $50,000 | 90% |
| Over $1 million | 0.5% |
Is the games market saturated?
"Is the market saturated" has no actionable answer. The useful question is which part is saturated, and is it the part I am aiming at.
Put the datasets side by side:
- Supply is compounding. Roughly 20,000 Steam releases in 2025, up from about 18,500 in 2024.
- Attention is not. Nearly half never cleared 10 reviews.
- Revenue is at record highs. ~$20B in 2025, and a record $11.1B in H1 2026 alone.
- New releases are taking a shrinking share of it. 29% to 21% in two years.
That last line is the one that reframes the other three. The competition is not only the 20,000 games that shipped alongside yours. It is Steam's entire back catalogue, which now takes 79% of the money, is permanently discounted, and never stops being available. A new game in 2026 is priced against a decade of proven titles at $5.
That is not a market running out of room. It is a market where the gap between shipping and being seen has widened, and the gap is discovery, not craft.
Shipping into the largest genre means entering the most defended position on the platform against teams with a decade of live operations and user acquisition budgets that can reprice your runway in a quarter. The revenue chart tells you the size of the prize. It says nothing about your odds of taking any.
The metric worth building is revenue per competitor, plus how much share has actually moved at the top in the last 18 months. A smaller genre with churn among its leaders beats a large one static since 2022.
Which genres are growing in 2026?
Mobile has the cleanest genre data. 2025 was flat, and Q1 2026 kept the pattern going.
Full-year 2025: mobile game revenue grew 0.2%, down from 3% the year before, with downloads up 4.6% (AppMagic via PocketGamer.biz, February 2026).
| Genre | 2024 | 2025 | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strategy | $10.8B | $13.5B | +25.6% |
| RPG | $13.7B | $11.6B | -15.4% |
| Puzzle | $7.7B | $8.8B | +14.7% |
| Casino | $7.8B | $7.2B | -7.6% |
| Simulation | $4.4B | $4.8B | +11.2% |
| Hybridcasual | $390M | $733M | +88% |
Strategy: AppMagic via PocketGamer.biz, 6 February 2026. Puzzle, casino, simulation: AppMagic Casual Games Report 2025, 24 February 2026. Two separate reports.
Q1 2026 (Sensor Tower, May 2026): Board +23%, Puzzle +21%, Shooter +12%, while Action, RPG and Casino declined.
Puzzle appears in both lists, growing in both. Casino declined in both. Strategy led 2025 and is not in Q1 2026's top movers, which is either rotation or a reporting difference between two firms measuring different genre taxonomies. Do not assume it is a collapse.
Read the casino row carefully. In 2025, downloads up 15.7%, revenue down 7.6%. More players, less money. That is a monetization problem, not an audience problem, and it is exactly the divergence a revenue ranking alone hides.
In a market growing at 0.2%, a genre growing at 16% is taking share from someone. That is redistribution, and redistribution is precisely the condition where a well-positioned entrant can take ground. For how genre constrains economy design, see game economy design.
Where are the underserved markets?
Caveat first: demand-versus-supply gap analysis is mostly published by commercial tools with a stake in the answer. The figures below come from aggregators, not first-party platform data, and we could not verify them at source. Treat them as leads to check, not facts to cite.
| Demand signal | Platform average | |
|---|---|---|
| Psychological horror | Wishlists +572% over 90 days; sales +65.5% | +1% wishlists; +4.6% sales |
| Anime turn-based RPG, character-driven | Wishlists +105% over 90 days; sales +17.6% | +1% wishlists; +4.6% sales |
The method underneath is more durable than either example: layer supply data on top of demand data. Rising wishlists plus rising release counts is a race. Rising wishlists plus flat release counts is a gap. Most teams only look at the demand half, which is why "underserved" so often turns out to mean "everyone else already noticed."
A caution on horror specifically: a 572% swing over 90 days is a small base moving fast, and by the time a signal that loud reaches a public blog the supply response is usually already in production. Signals this sharp decay quickly.
Two better-sourced gaps sit in the 2026 data above, if you want places to look rather than answers to take. The UK grew 20% in mobile in Q1 2026 while the US posted its second consecutive quarterly decline. And Africa showed strong download growth against falling downloads almost everywhere else. Neither is a genre. Both are markets, and both are moving in the opposite direction to where most roadmaps point.
Testing whether a gap is real before you commit budget is the problem gameloom exists to solve.
What performance should a new game expect?
Model against these, not against a hit. From GameAnalytics' 2026 Mobile & PC Gaming Benchmarks, published 4 June 2026, covering 2025 across 16,262 mobile games and 3,582 PC games:
Mobile retention
| Metric | Median | Top 25% | Top 10% | Top 1% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D1 | ~20% | just above 30% | ~40% | 64% to 68% |
| D7 | just under 4% | 6% to 7% | 11% to 12% | above 25%, to 28% |
| D30 | 0.69% to 0.79% | 1.6% to 1.8% | 13% to 15% |
PC retention
| Metric | Top 25% | Top 10% | Top 1% |
|---|---|---|---|
| D1 | 15% to 16% | 50% to 60% | |
| D7 | ~10% | above 20% | |
| D30 | ~2.5% | ~10% |
The median mobile game keeps under 4 players in every 100 to day seven, and fewer than 1 in 100 to day thirty. That is not a broken game. That is the middle of the distribution. Any model assuming better needs to say why this game is different, in terms a sceptic can check.
Note PC's D1 top quartile at 15% to 16%, half of mobile's 30%. Different install intent, different session pattern. Do not port a mobile retention assumption onto a PC title. More in game analytics.
How to read a games market statistic
The recurring failure across every section above is not bad data. It is data quoted without its scope. Researching this piece we discarded or corrected roughly a third of the figures we started with, including a headline number revised upward by $8 billion and a Steam total that moved by $2.3 billion between a December estimate and the firm's own July figure.
- Name the firm. "Industry reports say" is not a source.
- Check the publication date. Newzoo's 2025 figure moved from $188.8B to $197B within a year, and the old number is still in circulation.
- Establish the scope. Newzoo and Sensor Tower are $26 billion apart on 2025 mobile, and both are right. This one question resolves most apparent contradictions.
- Check the cohort. A median across "launches above 10,000 wishlists" tells you nothing about a launch with 4,000.
- Count the hops. Many widely-quoted figures are third-hand: a blog citing a newsletter citing a gated report. Each hop is a chance for a number to drift.
- Watch for numbers computed from a superseded base. Steam's indie share was calculated at 25% off a $17.7B estimate. Against the firm's own later $20B, it is closer to 22.5%. The 25% is still being quoted.
- Separate demand from supply. A revenue ranking is a demand signal. Without release volume beside it, it cannot tell you about competition.
- Prefer the boring number. A $249 median is more useful for planning than any headline market size.
FAQ
How big is the gaming industry in 2026? Industry forecasts $208.2 billion in global games revenue for 2026, following $197 billion in 2025, up 7.5% year on year. Those figures cover games software and services and exclude hardware. Estimates including hardware run higher, with Midia Research reporting around $236.9 billion.
How is the games industry performing in 2026 so far? Steam grossed a record $11.1 billion in H1 2026, up 14.5%, per Alinea Analytics. Mobile was flatter: Q1 2026 game IAP revenue rose 0.5% to $20.4 billion while downloads fell 11.9%, per Sensor Tower. Total mobile IAP across all categories grew 9.3% in the same quarter.
How many games are released on Steam each year? Roughly 20,000 in 2025, up from about 18,500 in 2024. Counts range from just over 19,000 to 20,282 depending on how each source handles delisted and re-released apps. Nearly half of 2025's releases finished the year with fewer than 10 user reviews.
What percentage of Steam games are successful? About 3% reach 1,000 reviews: 608 of 20,282 in 2025, per Chris Zukowski. Only around 300 games earned more than $1 million. The median Steam game grossed $249 in 2025 and 66% earned under $1,000, reflecting a power-law distribution.
Which game genre makes the most money? On mobile in 2025, puzzle led casual at $8.2 billion and strategy was the fastest-growing major genre at 16% revenue growth. Casino earned $6.9 billion but declined 7.6%. In Q1 2026, board games grew 23% and puzzle 21%, while action, RPG and casino declined.
Is the games market saturated in 2026? It is saturated in specific places, not uniformly. Steam hit a record $11.1 billion in H1 2026, but new releases took only 21% of platform revenue, down from 29% in H1 2024. Supply is compounding faster than attention, and the back catalogue now takes 79% of the money.
What is a good day 7 retention rate for a mobile game? The 2026 median is just under 4%, per GameAnalytics. The top 25% reach 6% to 7%, the top 10% reach 11% to 12%, and the top 1% exceed 25%. Median D1 retention is about 20% and median D30 sits between 0.69% and 0.79%.