Mobile drives global games market past $200 billion in 2025

Mobile kept its grip on the games business in 2025, and that dominance is likely to shape the apps, live-service plans and monetization players see next. Newzoo said the global games market closed the year at $201.6 billion, up 9.1% year over year, with mobile accounting for 56% of total revenue, or about $113 billion.

That result landed well above Newzoo’s earlier expectations. Its free 2025 forecast had put the year at $188.8 billion and expected the market to cross $200 billion only in 2027, while a later revision projected mobile at $103.1 billion in 2025. The company also says its estimates count consumer spending on games, software and services, and exclude hardware, advertising and betting revenues, which keeps the focus squarely on what players actually spend inside the ecosystem.

The bigger takeaway for mobile players is that the market is still growing, but not evenly. Newzoo says the industry has entered a more mature phase, with console now the fastest-growing platform, PC gaining ground in Asia and mobile growth slowing in mature markets. In practice, that points to a sharper fight for every install and every return session on phones, where publishers will keep leaning on live-service cadence, event-driven design and tighter monetization to defend revenue.

Newzoo’s broader player base data backs up that pressure. The global audience reached 3.6 billion players in 2025 and is forecast to approach 3.9 billion by 2028. But the spending map is getting more concentrated. China was the world’s largest games market in 2025 at $54.6 billion in consumer spending, followed by the United States at $50.8 billion, and the two countries together accounted for more than half of global games spending.

The final 2025 result also came in above Newzoo’s own prior read because PC grew faster than expected and mobile outperformed earlier estimates, especially in D2C, mini-games and Tencent revenues. That combination tells a clear story for the mobile space: the money is still there, but the easiest growth is getting harder to find, and the next wave of winners will be the games that can hold attention long enough to turn scale into repeat spending.