Analysts say PC gaming is now the one platform the place greater than 50% of income comes from video games exterior the highest 20

According to Newzoo’s PC & Console Gaming Report 2026, the lengthy tail retains getting longer—and in gaming, its longest on PC. “In Western markets,” the report states, “titles ranked 21+ grew from 48% to 56% in 2025. More than half of PC revenue in these markets now comes from games outside the Top 20.”

As nicely as shopping for extra video games from exterior the highest 20, we’re enjoying them for longer as nicely, with playtime for these video games up 44% “while total PC playtime grew 14% and Top 20 playtime was effectively flat to slightly down.”

Titles benefitting most from this continued curiosity in video games past the brand new hotness embrace “sturdy catalogue video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Skyrim” but also a lot of survival games and action RPGs—two genres where ongoing support, updates, and balancing keep players involved for longer. Rust, DayZ, and Path of Exile 2 are among the games benefiting most from continued interest.

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Meanwhile, on PlayStation those catalogue games “still compete directly with annualized sports franchises, which continue to absorb meaningful playtime even below the top tier.” When PlayStation players do dive back into older games it’s overwhelmingly the prestige games that launched as exclusives, like God of War Ragnarök, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man 2, and The Last of Us Part 2.

The Xbox, on the other hand, has cemented itself as the Game Pass machine, with playtime corresponding to whether something’s currently available on the subscription service or not. New free-to-play games count for “Less than 1% of playtime” on Xbox, presumably because they’re seen as a distraction from a Game Pass backlog you’ve already paid for.

Back when the concept of the long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in Wired over 20 years in the past, PC gaming was one of many markets he known as out as being well-placed to learn from it. “Retro gaming, including simulators of classic game consoles that run on modern PCs,” he wrote, “is a growing phenomenon driven by the nostalgia of the first joystick generation.”

But whereas Skyrim and DayZ are sufficiently old to qualify as retro, the latest previous can also be persevering with to attract curiosity past the purpose the place it used to. Newzoo highlights video games together with REPO and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 amongst these nonetheless promoting constantly though they’ve dropped out of the bestseller lists. Where there was a deadly drop on the far facet of latest and trending, there’s an excellent greater viewers than there was ready for gross sales or simply sufficient free time to take a look at the video games that have been huge a 12 months or so in the past.

As Tianyi Gu, supervisor of market evaluation at Newzoo, put it, “On PC, the space below the Top 20 is becoming more economically meaningful. That doesn’t make the market unconcentrated, but it does make games below the very top more commercially relevant than before.”