This article was originally published on December 12, 2025 - read the full issue

By Piers Harding-Rolls

The games sector has endured another year of ups and downs in 2025. There have been some standout success stories across different areas of the market, giving plenty to celebrate, but this has been achieved against a continued backdrop of industry reorganisation and resizing, along with the uncertainty that brings.

With over 3,000 jobs lost, it has been another bruising year, yet consumer spending on games continues to tick upwards and will end the year around $6–7bn higher than at the peak of the pandemic. A chunk of this increase is down to inflationary price rises across subscriptions, in-game items and currency, as well as some premium games, but there is also organic growth to be found elsewhere. At Ampere, we've done as much as possible this year to focus our research on market opportunities against this backdrop of slow growth and the challenging commercial environment.

A lot of the success stories in 2025 come from the console and PC gaming markets. Clearly, Switch 2 has been very well received. The amazingly strong sales at launch led us to upgrade our full-year forecasts, and it's now likely that over 15 million Switch 2s will be in players' hands by the end of the year. Even before it's been available for 12 months, Switch 2 has rapidly shot past ten million and represents a commercially viable platform for third-party publishers. This will intensify the commercial interest publishers have in the platform. Beyond Nintendo, the biggest console story has been the willingness of Microsoft and Sony to bring their games to other platforms. This has also helped highlight the ongoing success of Steam and PC gaming in general.

Microsoft's games strategy really evolved during 2025, and the need to realign its plan became a necessity following the closure of the Activision-Blizzard deal. A bigger onus on PC gaming, new content access points and hardware collaborations, a radical change to its exclusives strategy of past console cycles, and increased Game Pass pricing to drive profitability were just some of the actions the company took in 2025. The focus of the strategy is on audience reach for its content, building out the Xbox online ecosystem touch points, and delivering profitable growth.

Beyond Switch 2 success, there have been numerous standout console and PC games that have been commercial and critical hits, with many of them based on entirely new IP. These include Sandfall Interactive's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Embark Studios' ARC Raiders, Hazelight Studios' Split Fiction, Void Interactive's Ready Or Not, and Team Peak's Peak. Cooperative PVE games, cozy genres and mid-budget narrative titles all experienced strong engagement, regularly offering more commercially sustainable alternatives to the high-risk triple-A blockbuster model.

Other major commercial successes include EA's Battlefield 6, Century Games' mobile title Kingshot, and Warhorse Studios' Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. During the year, remakes and remasters continued to play a vital role in bolstering publishers' development pipelines on console and PC as the industry looked to de-risk their content investments, especially at the high end. Ampere's research shows that remakes and remasters released across 2024 and 2025 accumulated 72.4 million players across Xbox, PlayStation and Steam, and that these players spent over $1.4bn on premium full games and in-game monetisation during that time.

Finally, UGC game platforms had a massive year, particularly Roblox. The huge scale of the platform and the virality of some of the biggest games of the year including Grow A Garden really underlined their potential to disrupt other storefronts and game platforms.

I wanted to mention three other key areas of industry activity here. First is the rapid evolution of more holistic franchise strategies by game IP holders seeking to get a bigger return on their investments. Most commentary is focused on TV and film adaptations – of which there have been some standout examples this year, including The Last Of Us Season 2 and A Minecraft Movie – and these are rapidly becoming more important strategic pillars to reach new audiences and drive engagement. Ampere's research measures the impact successful adaptations can have on existing game franchises and how these different forms of content can work together to build out the value of IP. Beyond these adaptations, publishers are getting more active in developing into other areas, including merchandising and cross-game collaborations to drive revenue opportunities and offset large content investments.

Second, the mobile game market has had another year of disruption as the native app stores are forced to become more open. Regulatory pressure and new platform policies in the EU and other regions have unlocked alternative app distribution channels, enabling major publishers to experiment with direct-to-consumer app stores, web-based billing and loyalty ecosystems. While these strategies don't necessarily grow overall market sizing, they do offer a route to higher margins. However, it does mean that gaming playerbases are becoming more fragmented, which brings its own challenges.

Finally, it would be wrong not to mention EA's huge $55bn acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and private equity. This is a watershed moment for the industry. For the PIF, aside from continuing with its general strategy to diversify away from Saudi Arabia's fossil-fuel economy, acquiring EA represents a massive moment for its sports, games and esports portfolio. This investment represents a step change in commitment. EA fits into the PIF's strategy of accumulating soft power through entertainment and sports and, because of this, the value EA offers Saudi Arabia cannot simply be measured by the company's financial performance. EA's sports games business, and its sponsorship of multiple football/soccer leagues globally, means it is a perfect vehicle for raising the profile of the country across the areas of sports, games and esports.

This article was originally published on December 12, 2025 - read the full issue