For its presentation at GDC 2025, the analytics firm Newzoo prepared an overview of the state of the gaming industry. Below are key insights about the PC market.
Counter-Strike 2
Note: Newzoo's research is based on a survey of 73,000 gamers and data from over 10,000 games.
- In 2024, the number of PC gamers reached 907.5 million people, an increase of 34 million compared to 2023.
- For comparison: the console gaming audience last year amounted to 653.1 million people.
- Despite the growth in the user base, PC owners predominantly play older titles. From January to December 2024, gamers spent 67% of their time in games older than six years.
- 25% of gaming time was spent on projects released in the last 2-5 years, and only 8% on fresh releases (games less than two years old).
- Among titles older than six years, successful live services dominate. 7.1% of playtime is devoted to CS:GO/Counter-Strike 2, followed by League of Legends (6.4%), Roblox (6.2%), Dota 2 (5.8%), and Fortnite (5.4%).
This partly aligns with Steam's statistics. According to Valve, in 2024, only 15% of the platform users' gaming time was spent on new titles. The share of releases from 2017-2023 was 47%.