There are more folks spending more time playing PC games than ever before, but they’re increasingly spending their time playing older stuff. A new report by market research firm Newzoo estimates that only 8 percent of PC gaming hours in 2024 were spent on games that came out in that same year. It turns out the hundreds of hours each of us spent obsessed with Balatro was just a drop in the bucket compared to everything else.
“Overall playtime hours are growing, but concentrated in AAA and at times cannibalistic,” read Newzoo’s latest report, presented at GDC 2025 by the agency’s director of consulting, Ben Porter, VGC reports. “The battle for audience hours is fierce and near zero sum.”
The presentation, titled “The State of PC and Console Games in 2025,” looked at gaming habits on both types of platforms and found that PC gamers are much more likely to be playing games that are at least six years old like Roblox, League of Legends, and Fortnite. Games like that accounted for 67 percent of PC play time, while games that were 2-5 years old accounted for 25 percent. Things that came out in 2024, like Helldivers 2, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Black Myth: Wukong, only accounted for 8 percent total.
The number echoes Newzoo’s similar report from 2024, though the trend appears to be getting worse. On the one hand, it’s not surprising that more time is spent playing older games. Imagine taking the 100 best games of the past 25 years. Most of those didn’t come out in the last six. At the same time, each new year sees way more game releases than the last. Over 18,000 games launched on Valve’s storefront in 2024, up 5,000 from 2023.
The death grip of old games is less dramatic on console, but still significant. About 44 percent of time on PlayStation was spent on games that came out six or more years ago. The number was 49 percent on Xbox. But console players spent twice as much time on games that came out in 2024 as their counterparts on PC, with 15 percent of playtime going to new releases like Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.
Anecdotally, the impact of this trend is clear. New games, no matter how great they are, have a much smaller shot at breaking through the noise and becoming one of the select few that garners lots of attention and players. The result is more ruthless competition for existing players’ attention and bigger studios and publishers being less willing to take risks on new genres, ideas, and franchises.
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