Are We at Peak Gaming? Seven Questions Shaping 2025
Every year, Newzoo’s market report lands like a thunderclap. Hundreds of pages of charts and forecasts that try to make sense of where games are heading. This year’s edition felt especially heavy, not just in file size (the paid version puts Matthew Ball’s industry decks to shame), but in implication.
To digest it, I sat down with Emmanuel “Manu” Rosier, Newzoo’s Director of Market Intelligence, and tried to pull out the big questions. What follows are seven of them. With Manu’s perspective, my pushback, and hopefully some clarity on what it all means for us, building and investing in games.
Q1: Plateauing Players – The Edge of Peak Gaming?
The share of the online population that plays games is flat at ~61% growing at the pace of population growth. Have we hit “peak gaming”?
Newzoo projects 3.6 billion players in 2025, yet the share of the online population that plays games is flat at ~61%. Have we hit “peak gaming”?
Manu framed it as a generational saturation point:
“When I was young, I was the only generation playing video games. But now every generation is playing. Every age band is filled. So we don’t have the organic growth we used to.”
In other words, the tank is nearly full. The industry can’t keep counting on more new players every year. Growth must now come from deeper play: more hours per player, more engagement per screen. And Gen Alpha is obliging. Manu’s kids, he said, will watch YouTube, listen to a podcast, and play Roblox simultaneously. Not dividing 24 hours of attention, but multiplying them.
That’s the growth lever: parallel consumption, not population expansion.
But here’s the existential twist: the market now hinges on a handful of tentpole releases. If GTA VI, the game everyone is pinning the console forecast on, stumbles, the whole racket wobbles. What happens when the savior game flops? That’s a risk this industry hasn’t internalized.
Q2: Payers vs. Revenue: Democratization or Fatigue?
More people are paying, but each is paying less.
Payer growth (+4.9%) is outpacing revenue growth (+3.4%). Translation: more people are paying, but each is paying less. The global payer base now tops 1.6 billion, with a 44% conversion rate and average annual spend of $119.
Is this cause for celebration or concern?
On one hand, it’s democratization. Manu noted:
“We’ve basically reached everyone. So the story now isn’t just whales spending more. It’s more people contributing something.”
On the other hand, spend-per-user erosion signals fatigue. The battle pass has been commoditized. Gacha doesn’t excite. Players may still love games, but their wallets are saying: Enough!
That’s a harder business to run. Growth feels good in the headlines, but margins quietly shrink.
Q3: Mobile Slowdown aka. The D2C Mirage
Mobile is big and the revenues are growing. But gone are the double digit growth rates and they aint’t coming back. That means, you gotta take someone’s share to grow yours instead of just holding to your own and watching the pie grow for all.
Mobile still dominates with $103B in 2025 revenue, but growth slows to 2.9%. The bright spot is direct-to-consumer (D2C) monetization, as Epic and others push players off the app stores.
Manu was cautiously skeptical:
“Short term, it feels like a win for developers. But it’s more friction for the player. And when there’s friction, players will expect to get something back.”
He compared it to the era when every PC publisher forced players onto their own launcher: Origin, Uplay, Battle.net. Fragmentation bred frustration, and ultimately, everyone returned to Steam.
History suggests the same will happen here. Apple will fight tooth and nail to keep users inside its walls, while players will gravitate to convenience. Developers may claw back margins for now, but at the cost of discoverability and trust.
The real winners? Payment intermediaries and tool providers. Everyone else is fighting uphill.
Q4: Console Resurgence – Renaissance or Mirage?
Here’s the headline shocker: console is the fastest-growing platform in 2025, at +5.5% YoY. On paper, that looks like a renaissance. In reality, it’s GTA VI and Switch 2 hype doing heavy lifting.
Manu’s view was blunt:
“Console growth is always tied to hardware and software slates. A Switch 2 bump, a GTA VI bump — those are one-off events, not structural growth.”
And my own take: consoles are increasingly just branded PCs. The days of generational leaps are gone. The PlayStation 5’s most notable innovation? Faster loading thanks to SSDs. You can’t build a marketing campaign around “less waiting” and a “Pro” sticker.
The console wars have devolved into portfolio wars. It’s IP slates instead of pixels. And for younger players raised on Roblox, a $500 box tied to the TV feels like legacy tech.
Q5: Genre Shifts: The End of Pixel Wars
Shooters dominate PC revenues. Other genres grow and decline as hits come and go.
Shooters remain dominant but revenues slipped in 2025, while Puzzle and Strategy surged on mobile. Is this a structural shift?
Manu pointed out that much of genre data is slate-driven: if Call of Duty has a good year, shooters look strong; if Battlefield stumbles, they don’t. But he also acknowledged a deeper generational change:
“Gen Alpha is less into pure PvP duels. They want shared experiences, co-op, and social play. Creativity matters more than pixels.”
This dovetails with the broader “end of the pixel wars.” For decades, developers shipped games that required constant hardware upgrades. Players grudgingly complied. Now, with global inflation and stagnant wages, the economics have flipped. Players tell publishers: downgrade your games, don’t force me to upgrade my rig.
As Manu put it:
“A game like Battlefront 2 from 7 years ago looks as crisp as a new game today. There’s no reason to keep pushing for 8K.”
Content and community trump fidelity. Roblox, Delta Force, and even simulation genres are thriving not because they’re prettier, but because they’re accessible and social.
Q6: Remakes & Nostalgia: Hedge or Surrender?
Nostalgia is important. But this chart is easy to dismiss. Even Manu admitted it in the podcast.
Remakes and remasters are everywhere. Resident Evil’s modernized remakes worked. Dead Space earned rave reviews. But most are reheated leftovers, produced on tight budgets by outsourced teams.
Manu drew the parallel to Hollywood:
“Who would bet $100M on a new IP today? Trends shift overnight. Just like the movie industry, games lean on franchises because it’s safer.”
Remakes hedge against ballooning dev costs. They test whether IP still resonates. They also risk suffocating creativity. Every remake greenlit is one less original world imagined.
It’s easy money today. But at what cultural cost?
Q7: Roblox & UGC: Exception or Blueprint?
Let’s be honest, there’s one in a billion chance someone replicates Roblox, no matter what their pitches say.
Roblox has our kids. Will it keep on to the young audience as they age up? Looks like it…
Roblox has grown into a cultural operating system, bigger than Xbox in concurrent players. It’s powered by UGC, Gen Alpha habits, and zero friction.
Is it replicable?
Manu’s take was cautious:
“It’s both an exception and a blueprint. It was unique when it launched, and it may stay unique because it’s hard to replicate. But it shows where the audience is heading.”
The truth is that AAA publishers can’t pivot to this model. They’re “old dogs,” as I joked to Manu, stuck chasing prettier pixels while kids happily play “Steal Your Brain Rot” inside Roblox.
Social graphs don’t migrate easily. Free, cross-platform access is unbeatable. And the younger generation has grown up in this ecosystem. It isn’t a fad; it’s their baseline.
Closing Thought: What No Longer Works
What struck me most in this conversation wasn’t what’s “next” but what’s over.
Hardware cycles don’t drive growth.
Pixel arms races no longer matter.
$100M new IP bets look reckless.
The industry must adapt to a new reality: players want accessibility, community, and creativity more than fidelity. Roblox is the canary in the coal mine, proof that culture is migrating faster than boardrooms can.
As Manu put it:
“We’re getting old. We need to accept that today’s players have different expectations than the people still making the decisions.”
Gaming’s future won’t be a shinier version of the past. It will be platforms that lower friction, genres that welcome everyone, and creators young enough to invent what older executives can’t even imagine.
