Feels like Destiny.
Ben Porter, director at the consultancy firm NewZoo, is giving a GDC talk this week that picks out some highlights from the firm’s annual look at the state of the games industry. PC Gamer was fortunate enough to get a sneak peek at his slides, and one of the takeaways is that PC gaming is bigger than ever: And we love to play old games.
The results are extrapolated from a yearly in-depth survey of 73,000 players, alongside data from over 10,000 games. From this NewZoo says that the PC market is growing at a steady rate, with an estimated 873.5 million players in 2023 rising to 907.5 million in 2024.
I know you’ll all like this one: that handily beats out the console audience, of whom there were an estimated 653.1 million in 2024.
And the data further shows, in NewZoo’s own words, that these 908 million “PC players are heavily skewed towards older, live service games.”
The data shows that from January 2024 to December 2024, 67% of player hours on PC were spent on a game that was six or more years old. A further 25% of player hours were spent on games that were two to five years old, and the remaining 8% of time was spent on games that are less than two years old.
NewZoo’s data further breaks down that 67% chunk. Within this:
- 7.1% of the total hours spent were on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2
- 6.4% were in League of Legends
- 6.2% were in Roblox
- 5.8% were in Dota 2
- 5.4% were in Fortnite
Obviously we could split hairs here: Counter-Strike 2 only released last year, so what’s it doing in this category? I can see the argument, because it is essentially a ground-up remake of 2012’s CS:GO, which itself could be considered a remake of 2000’s Counter-Strike.
But whether we accept CS2’s presence or otherwise, the general picture doesn’t change. PC players are overwhelmingly spending their time on older games: 92% of our time goes into games that are more than two years old.
As a brief aside, if you ever wonder why publishers are so obsessed with making live service games, and why so many of them fail, this gives you both answers. Get it right and a live service game is a golden goose, a forever money machine. Why do new ones fall flat? Because by-and-large the audience already likes what it likes.
This is in some ways not surprising, and reflects the size and scale of the PC gaming market. Not everyone is playing on the latest hardware, or has the money to constantly buy the newest titles, but PC as a platform offers endless ways to play for ‘free’ (the five titles that NewZoo picked out as dominating playtime are all F2P) alongside regular opportunities to pick up older titles for a pittance.
The interesting thing is, as someone who does this for a living, it shows the disconnect between consumer interests and much of the industry coverage, which tend to skew towards the latest hot game or big disaster. But that’s not being reflected in PC gamers’ general playing habits where, much like comfort food, we tend to have favourite older titles and stick with them.
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