Global video game content sales grew 5.3% to $195.6 billion in 2025, whereas personal funding fell one other 55%.
That is in accordance to the newest State of Video Gaming 2026 report, revealed by Epyllion CEO Matthew Ball. The report famous that whereas the business noticed three years of development and a brand new income excessive in 2025, funding continued to decline.
There have been 40 offers in complete in the final three months of 2025, with lower than $100 million of pre-seed investments and over $200 million in early-stage funding.
Layoffs continued to have an effect on the business, with 9,200 individuals dropping their jobs final 12 months. This was 40% lower than in 2024, however the four-year complete of layoffs reached practically 44,000.
Virtually half of the redundancies occurred in California between 2022 and 2025, with 18% in the remainder of the US. 16% have been in Europe, whereas 19% have been in the APAC area, China, the Center East, and Africa.
In 2025, outsourcing made up 35.5% of builders’ complete content funding, up from 30.6% in 2017 and 31.5% throughout COVID-19.
The report famous an “rising reliance on exterior companions for core artistic work,” together with artwork, game design, and engineering. Outsource customers stated that 60% to 95% of labor in areas like animation, audio, and environmental design is outsourced.
“Versatile skillset” was the highest cause for utilizing exterior growth service suppliers in 2025, adopted by the flexibility to “construct extra content” and “entry hard-to-find abilities.”
Group Cherry’s Hole Knight: Silksong and Pocketpair’s Palworld have been two titles that relied closely on outsourcing. In accordance to the report, there have been three inside credit for Silksong, in contrast with 94 exterior credit, whereas Palworld had 97 inside credit and 93 exterior credit, the latter together with 80 from Key phrases Studios.
The report additionally examined worldwide shopper spending on video game content for console and PC.
Shopper spending on console reached $41.6 billion, 2.3% above $41.1 billion in 2020. The report famous that 119% of internet spending development since then went to platform companies like PlayStation Plus, Xbox Game Go, and Nintendo Change On-line.
Nevertheless, complete spending on console game sales and transactions was down practically 11% year-on-year.
For PC, world shopper spending grew 30% since 2020, reaching $40.7 billion in 2025, up from $31.4 billion.
China accounts for 20% of world participant spend, with Epyllion CEO Matthew Ball suggesting that “if a game maker desires to ‘match’ world development, they need to win China (or develop 1.6 instances the market elsewhere).”
Total, Chinese language publishers have captured roughly half of the worldwide development in participant spending since 2019.
One platform that noticed main development in 2025 was Roblox, changing into the “singular driver of the full video game market” and capturing 67% of internet development.
By the tip of 2024, Roblox had extra each day lively customers (DAU) than PlayStation, Change or Xbox. In 2025, this was up one other 69%.
The platform has additionally reached over 10 billion month-to-month engagement hours, greater than Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite mixed.
Wanting forward, Ball means that the 5 largest income development areas for video video games in 2026 will likely be: Non-core markets, promoting, direct-to-consumer and various cost channels, exterior growth, and Roblox.