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The State of Video Gaming in 2025

• Source
• 2011 --> 2021
  • Growth years
  • Spending >2x the previous 20 years
• Growth is hard to predict (lol @ Ark)
• Spending in other entertainment mediums continued to grow but tiny numbers compared to gaming's 108% increase between 2011 --> 2021
• VCs are frothy
• Big variety of growth engines
  • Battle Royales
    • Highest grossing genre in history
  • UGC
    • Most popular experiences of all time
• Black hole games?
  • Massive franchises that suck players into their regularly released games
• 68% of mobile users (~3B) are mobile gamers
• Fewer hours spent gaming, top games dominating, fewer mobile games overall
• Apple/Google make more on mobile games than all non-Chinese gaming companies combined
• AR never took off
• PC + mobile + handheld seem to be the real winners today
• China starts gaming
• Game cost with inflation is nuts (no wonder hours have gone up with all the free games)
  • Mortal Kombat: $157
  • Mario Paint: $134
  • Monopoly: $123
• Game prices don't follow inflation
• Halo 6 was the highest cost at $600MM
• Way more PC games (Steam) are being released
  • But older games are taking the majority of play time + money
• What happens to Roblox gamers as they hit their late teens and adulthood?
• Content revenue per thous hours of player engagement
  • Roblox gets crushed here vs other platforms (PlayStation, Steam, EA, etc.)
• lol @ the Switch version of popular games
• Users go to the best screen
  • Crazy that 45% of YouTube watching is on TV
• Reed's Law
• EA Sports' Highlighter 🤯
• Streaming platforms influence of gaming engagement
  • 28% of players start playing a game within an hour of watching it streamed
  • 1.4M monthly users try games for the first time after watching streams