UK games market hits £8.7 billion as digital and mobile grow

The UK games business got bigger in 2025, but the gains still did not reach every corner of the industry. Ukie said UK consumers spent £8.76 billion on video games, up 7.4% year on year, with software at £6.03 billion, digital console spending up 9.2% to £2.49 billion, hardware up 3% to £2.17 billion and mobile reaching £2.07 billion.

The sharpest reminder of where the money is flowing came from outside the console aisle. Game culture spending rose 42% to £566 million, including £159 million from game-related film and TV, while toys and merchandising climbed 43% to £333 million. A Minecraft Movie took £56.8 million at the UK box office and became the highest-earning video game film in British cinema history, a sign that games are now selling well beyond the launch window and into cinemas, shelves and streaming.

London still sits near the center of that growth. Games London said the capital ranked third globally for games-making talent, behind only Los Angeles and San Francisco, with more than 13,700 games professionals in the city and another 9,000 people working in adjacent games-associated sectors. Ukie’s January 2025 factsheet put the UK games industry at £6 billion in gross value added, with 2,000 games businesses and 26,000 direct jobs, underlining how large the ecosystem has become even before transmedia revenue is counted.

The employment picture, though, was far uglier. TIGA said UK games employment fell 4.5% year on year, from 28,516 in May 2024 to 27,347 in September 2025. Across that period, 491 companies cut 3,655 full-time roles, 513 growing studios added 2,751 jobs, 206 companies shuttered or left the industry, and new studio formation dropped from 281 startups to 137, a 15-year low.

Nick Poole, Ukie’s chief executive, called the spending rise a “remarkable vote of confidence” despite rising costs and squeezed household budgets, and said the next 12 months could be defining for UK-developed titles. Richard Wilson, TIGA’s chief executive, warned that without policy intervention the UK risks losing skilled jobs and falling behind better-supported international competitors. The market is still expanding, but the evidence points to a harsher truth: the biggest winners are increasingly the companies that own the storefronts, the hardware cycle and the cross-media spillover, not necessarily the studios building the games.