Ben Porter, director of consulting at Newzoo, a video game market research company, said during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that there are now 907.5 million PC players. Most of them prefer older games. This is reported by PC Gamer.
The player preferences data is based on an annual survey of over 73,000 gamers and statistics from over 10,000 games. According to Newzoo, the PC gaming market continues to grow, reaching 907.5 million players in 2024 (up from 873.5 million in 2023). At the same time, consoles played 653.1 million users in 2024.
According to Newzoo, while the PC audience is huge, the most popular games-as-services released more than 6 years ago remain. They accounted for 67% of total PC play time in 2024. Games between 2 and 5 years old accounted for 25%, while projects released in the last 2 years scored only 8%.
Among the most popular games released over 6 years ago, the distribution of play time looks like this:
- 7.1% – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2.
- 6.4% – League of Legends
- 6.2% – Roblox
- 5.8% – Dota 2
- 5.4% – Fortnite.
Counter-Strike 2 made it to this list, even though it was only released in September 2023, less than 2 years ago. Newzoo probably counts it as an update to CS:GO, which was released in 2012, since the core player base remained the same and the game didn't even get a separate client on Steam.
A similar situation has developed in previous years. Last year's Newzoo report shows that in 2023, the majority of PC gamers still spent the majority of their time playing games that were released more than 6 years ago.
Earlier, investment firm Epyllion published a report on the state of the gaming market, which noted that PC game sales are exceeding console sales. The document also noted the growth of PC games, although mobile projects remain ahead in terms of profitability.