14 trends for the next 5 years of PC/console games
What, high-level, us? Also: this week's Steam debuts & lots of discovery news
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
Time to segue into the ‘end of week’ GameDiscoverCo newsletter. And a warning: my colleague Alejandro and I were originally planning to do another Steam deep-data dive, but just didn’t have the stomach for it. So we regressed to a) a trends piece with b) Beatles semaphore pics and c) alligator jokes instead. It’s fiiine.
Before we start, influencer Blurbs decided to make some incredibly silly Skyrim mods suggested by his chat, including weapons that slip out of your hands and chicken vomiting spells. But our fave is the mod where you debate dragons on geopolitics to beat them: “What’s your stance on rumors that ibuprofen is causing vampirism in Tamriel?”
[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - >95 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
News: Saros, Dawnwalker loom on the horizon….
Let’s get started with the rest of the discovery & platform news for the week, starting with the following:
The latest top ‘trad media’ mentions from ICO’s Footprints.gg are filled with the obvious (Crimson Desert, Black Flag remaster, Pragmata), but also Housemarque & PlayStation’s roguelite action-er Saros (#3, out yesterday) and Witcher-y vampire adventure Blood Of Dawnwalker (#6, pre-orders & Sept release date confirmed.)
Xbox’s quarterly results were non-optimum: “Gaming rev down 7% [YoY]… Xbox content + services rev down 5%… Xbox hardware rev down 33%”, with guidance for the next quarter to be down “in the low-teens, reflecting… strong first-party content [a year ago], as well as the recent price changes for Xbox Game Pass.”
We found John Welfare’s giant multi-year graph to be helpful in contextualizing: “Total Revenue [for quarter]: $5.341 billion… Content & Services: ~$5.120b… Hardware: ~$221 million.” (So at this point, hardware is a bit of a rounding error.) Xbox’s Asha Sharma noted: “Player and revenue growth has not yet met our ambition. We know we have work to do.” (Though Xbox MAUs were a record, per Satya Nadella.)
Steam ad ‘takeover’ watch: as you can see, both co-op robo-Western shooter Far Far West and turn-based strategy reboot Heroes Of Might & Magic: Olden Era got store-wide frontpage takeovers at various points this week! (Diablo IV got a more focused wishlister/player takeover, thanks to its Lord Of Hatred expansion.)
A Sony statement on the ‘online checks’ farrago for PlayStation games: “The new system will require only a single online check before it functions as a perpetual license for the digitally purchased game.” (People think it’s related to an exploit in “the 14-day window that PlayStation users have to request a refund for digitally purchased games.”)
To encourage games for older players, Roblox is “increasing the DevEx [royalty] rate by 42% for spend from age-checked 18 and older U.S. players”, if your game uses the (less blocky!) R15 avatar. Also, Roblox says “its creators have earned over $1.6 billion through its DevEx program in the last year… up over 63% YoY” - lots more detail here.
Despite Q1 bookings of $1.7b and free cash flow of $596m, Roblox’s share price is down ~20%, after it decreased forecasts, “citing headwinds from its age-verification rollout that restricted user communication and slowed new user acquisition”, and its Russia ban. Full-year $ guidance of $7.47b “falls well below the analyst consensus of $8.38b.” (Big +35% YoY growth to 132m DAU, but down from 152m in Q3 2025.)
Mythmatch dev Moo Yu has been transparent about his budget, which we always appreciate, with code handled by him gratis, and otherwise: “Project Duration: 4 Years… Total Budget: £99,812.50 ($135k)”, w/contractors split 47% art, 19% writing, 17% design, 14% audio and 2% other, with a £250 ($340) day rate for all contractors.
Mobile game news: Stillfront’s CEO was talking about their latest results, and we spotted that “44% of [the company’s mobile game revenue] is now going through a DTC platform”, up from 36% the previous year. That’s almost half the revenue outside of iOS/Android stores, “driven by players actively being incentivized” to go off-platform.
Much discussion of PlayStation/Xbox console exclusives recently. Circana’s Mat Piscatella: “[Xbox] and Sony began dabbling outside of console exclusivity because the console [hardware] market wasn’t growing. And now both are considering moving back more towards console exclusivity, because the console HW isn’t growing.” As Chris Dring adds, looks like it’s going to get more ‘case-by-case’, going forward.
Microlinks: PlayStation Plus’ monthly games for May 2026 are EA Sports FC 26, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, Nine Sols; the top console games in India in 2025 were Ghost of Yotei, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and EA FC 26; the latest Steam client update allows you manage downloads on remote Steam installs - handy.
14 trends for the next 5 years: PC/console games
At GameDiscoverCo, we tend to thrive on the granular and specific. So you won’t see many higher-level articles from us. But in this case, we were piqued by Horace Dediu’s excellent analysis firm Asymco, which focuses purely on Apple, but has been posting some fascinating graphs on ‘worldwide active devices’ as part of that.
This is his work extracting those numbers for 2007 to 2030, including mobile devices, PC, and console:
Dediu’s conclusion from this: “Google and Apple will be the primary distributors for all software and services into the foreseeable future. Try as they might, challengers face over 9 billion in installed base. Note well how entrenched Windows has been on the desktop even as (free) Linux and (better) macOS alternatives have harvested usage. This rigidity has held over the 1.5 billion addressable market for 30 years now. For additional evidence consider the dynamics, or lack thereof, of the game console business.”
In a separate post imagining John Ternus stepping down as Apple CEO in 2040 (!), he adds this (below) view of the same graph, by percentage of the total in any given year.
What’s notable here? Well, game consoles were close to 10% of the addressable device market for games back in 2010, and might be at 3% in 2030. And PC was over 70% in 2010, and might be 12% (Windows & Linux) in 2030. In some ways, this is a weird, skewed view. The market’s not down. But look, it’s an interesting perspective:
Then, we read ‘The video game industry’s very dark night’, a longform piece focused partly on PC/console games by by ex-game biz (BioWare, Ubisoft) contrarian Georg Zoeller. And we got, well, a little maudlin: “There is no compelling answer to the question of "Why should I invest my money in games instead of other opportunities?" and many answers to ‘Why shouldn't I?’, some of which are provided below.” Time to sob?
7 PC game biz trends for now (& the next 5 years!)
Luckily, while searching for a Kleenex, we ran into our bullet-points for a ‘state/future of the PC/console biz’ client off-site .PPT a couple of weeks ago. (There were alligators. But since the client didn’t pay for the alligators - or the hot dogs fed to them - there’s no conflict of interest. Just don’t tell the alligators about the content repurposing?)
So that’s the point of this newsletter - cuing off the graphs & article, some helpful trend prognostication which should apply both for a) now b) the next 5 years, even more so. Let’s start with ‘what we think of the PC game biz’:
Without catalog revenue, it’s risky AF: if we had a dollar for every publisher earnings that includes the phrase ‘record catalog revenue’, we’d have… a lot of dollars. You need older games with good Steam wishlist balances, but that strength is the ultimate hedge. (If a slowly decreasing one - you still need hits!)
Lots of interest in high-hook, lower polish games: we’ve talked about this before, but ‘graphical sophistication’ - by whatever weird stick you measure that by - is not a primary revenue driver. It’s about the idea, the gameplay loop, and often the depth and immersive of experience. Worrying about surface-level polish’ll kill ya.
Discount-driven sales disadvantage new titles: we’re seeing constant catalog sales of older $20 games for $5, and $60 games (with DLC providing yield wins) for $20. So when your new game is coming out at $20 with a 10% discount? It does need to be pretty special to stand out from the reduced-price comps.
Most veteran devs have their cost-base too high: this one’s rough. But unless you have big older games that are holding down the fort for you, revenue-wise, only the truly compact will survive. Why? Because it’s the compact that are having hits.
Small amounts of AAA(A) games still break out: here’s the flipside of that. Make something truly standout using a lot of money, and people will take notice. Crimson Desert managed it, for example, with that circus scene and some epic scope. But it’s so easy to slip into that mid-area of ‘lots of $, can’t tell/don’t care’.
‘Random’ indies continue to thrive (low % chance): we feature a lot of those folks in the newsletter. We think there’s some skill involved in both a) picking the right subgenre b) executing. There’s also a lottery element. But those making games in 2026 may best thrive with a core team of <5 people. (We know that’s small.)
All others wallow in the ‘too many games’ morass: we also grok this marshy area, since most are in it. Games that would have debuted to 500 CCU on Steam eight years ago are now debuting to 100 CCU or less. They’re not worse, there’s just so much good material out there. ‘Here comes everybody’, indeed.
We’d actually give the PC game biz a B- right now - in the sense that it’s a mess, but it’s absolutely a mess it’s possible to do well in, if you play your cards right. (Or get lucky - that’s allowed, too.)
7 console game biz trends for now (& the next 5 years!)
And let’s finish off with ‘what we think of the console game biz’. Again, these are ‘now’ trends that we see continuing into the future. And repeating - there’s no reset, or change coming up we see that will change this:
PlayStation/Xbox works great as ‘new Resident Evil’ machine: looking at games doing well on console in 2026 so far - well, Res Evil Requiem, which we have at 4m+ console units, is one of a handful. Core console players who haven’t migrated to PC (or also buy games on PC!) are looking for marquee games, and… that’s it?
Momentum on PS for shooters, sports, epic ARPGs: games like ARC Raiders and Battlefield 6 have made a splash on console. Sports games (soccer, basketball, football) also do great. There’s a few other exceptions - Split Fiction, Silksong, ARPGs like Monster Hunter Wilds & Ghost Of Yotei. Otherwise, hits are limited.
Switch 2 = disappointing for third-parties: there’s a few exceptions for Nintendo-y games or clever standouts (especially on the cozy side), but our data says that you’re struggling to sell >100k for most third-party games.
Why? Early adopters have big existing Switch catalogs: It’s just not a dynamic market, with upgrading Switch 1 fans - the majority of Switch 2 players - already swimming in games. And then there’s the classic ‘Nintendo has loads of exclusive titles which fans may buy first’ issue.
Xbox fading out, but still has core US/UK fans: some games like Ready Or Not or Marathon have had much close to 1:1 ratio across Xbox and PlayStation than you would expect, given the >2:1 difference in installed base in favor of PlayStation. That’d be those key markets kicking in.
Overall, ‘average game’ total console # = <50% PC: yes, you should expect your combined PlayStation, Switch and Xbox totals to be less than 50% of your Steam sales unless you have a particularly console friendly title (see above.)
Size of catalog/availability of discounts = huge issue: if you look at the amount of AAA console games that are discounted to $15-$20 from $60-$70 at any time, and the sheer amount of games now available on (less new game-first) console storefronts, well…. players are eating well, but breaking through the noise, oof.
And then we haven’t even got into the existing & larger upcoming issues around console hardware affordability. New consoles could change things - and GTA VI could accelerate interest. But consoles will still be a) expensive and b) require a TV, just not crazily mass-market. So we’re going to have to give consoles a C- right now.
Why? They’re great as another Resident Evil delivery mechanism (or for Fortnite), but seem largely closed to newness in most genres. (Except via the console sub services like PS+ and Game Pass, which are ‘just fine’ and can have decent reach, but are not a profitability fix for devs…)
Debuts on Steam: Might, Magic, Far, Far, West…
Let’s cut across to analysis of this week’s Steam debuts (for GameDiscoverCo Pro & Plus subscribers) to finish off, And three games hit >10k CCU (a good result!) after release, as pictured above. Can you name all three? We’re about to…