Newzoo: 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

[Vault-Tec]

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.

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

PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now

Feels like Destiny.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Danny]

What we can see is that live service dominates both console and PC market, meaning for traditional single player games, the growth of PC gaming is no panacea for their declining sales potential. People jump into pc gaming to play GAAS there instead of on consoles, not to buy new single player games.

 

[KarlRemarx]

What we can see is that live service dominates both console and PC market, meaning for traditional single player games, the growth of PC gaming is no panacea for their declining sales potential. People jump into pc gaming to play GAAS there instead of on consoles, not to buy new single player games.

You can go on Steam right now and see that a wide variety of major singleplayer games were sitting alongside the service games in gross revenue in 2024. Of course service games are going to achieve more overall hours played than singleplayer games (which in most cases will be played once and then put down), when service games are a) explicitly designed to be time sinks and b) most of them are completely free or incredibly cheap to play.

 

[AshenOne]

What we can see is that live service dominates both console and PC market, meaning for traditional single player games, the growth of PC gaming is no panacea for their declining sales potential. People jump into pc gaming to play GAAS there instead of on consoles, not to buy new single player games.

On PC, Games like WoW, Overwatch, LoL, CS have always had half or more than half of the marketshare in the past and that is increasing even now.

But that also does not contradict the fact that People on PC also are growing in number when it comes to Non Live Service titles..Steam CCU for game launches in recent years should be a huge evidence of that. Steam users grow in huge number by each month and so the do the Non-live service game launches CCU wise compared to previous years.

So no that is not a valid statement imo.