14 Trends Shaping PC and Console Games Over the Next Five Years

May 2, 2026 - 07:02

The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by Simon Carless, an expert in how people find your game and company founder. This is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.

Time to segue into the end of week newsletter. A warning: my colleague Alejandro and I were originally planning to do another Steam deep-data dive, but just did not have the stomach for it. So we regressed to a trends piece with Beatles semaphore pictures and alligator jokes instead. It is fine.

Before we start, influencer Blurbs decided to make some incredibly silly Skyrim mods suggested by his chat, including weapons that slip out of your hands and chicken vomiting spells. But our favorite is the mod where you debate dragons on geopolitics to beat them: "What's your stance on rumors that ibuprofen is causing vampirism in Tamriel?"

At GameDiscoverCo, we tend to thrive on the granular and specific. So you will not see many higher-level articles from us. But in this case, we were piqued by Horace Dediu's excellent analysis firm Asymco, which focuses purely on Apple, but has been posting some fascinating graphs on worldwide active devices as part of that.

This is his work extracting those numbers for 2007 to 2030, including mobile devices, PC, and console.

Dediu's conclusion from this: Google and Apple will be the primary distributors for all software and services into the foreseeable future. Try as they might, challengers face over 9 billion in installed base. Note well how entrenched Windows has been on the desktop even as free Linux and better macOS alternatives have harvested usage. This rigidity has held over the 1.5 billion addressable market for 30 years now. For additional evidence consider the dynamics, or lack thereof, of the game console business.

In a separate post imagining John Ternus stepping down as Apple CEO in 2040, he adds a view of the same graph by percentage of the total in any given year.

What is notable here? Well, game consoles were close to 10 percent of the addressable device market for games back in 2010, and might be at 3 percent in 2030. And PC was over 70 percent in 2010, and might be 12 percent in 2030. In some ways, this is a weird, skewed view. The market is not down. But look, it is an interesting perspective.

Then we read The Video Game Industry's Very Dark Night, a longform piece focused partly on PC and console games by ex-game biz contrarian Georg Zoeller. And we got a little maudlin: "There is no compelling answer to the question of 'Why should I invest my money in games instead of other opportunities?' and many answers to 'Why shouldn't I?', some of which are provided below." Time to sob?

Luckily, while searching for a Kleenex, we ran into our bullet-points for a state and future of the PC and console biz client off-site presentation from a couple of weeks ago. There were alligators. But since the client did not pay for the alligators or the hot dogs fed to them, there is no conflict of interest. Just do not tell the alligators about the content repurposing.

So that is the point of this newsletter. Cuing off the graphs and article, some helpful trend prognostication which should apply both for now and the next five years, even more so. Let us start with what we think of the PC game biz.

Without catalog revenue, it is risky AF. If we had a dollar for every publisher earnings that includes the phrase record catalog revenue, we would have a lot of dollars. You need older games with good Steam wishlist balances, but that strength is the ultimate hedge. If a slowly decreasing one, you still need hits.

Lots of interest in high-hook, lower polish games. We have talked about this before, but graphical sophistication by whatever weird stick you measure that by is not a primary revenue driver. It is about the idea, the gameplay loop, and often the depth and immersive experience. Worrying about surface-level polish will kill you.

Discount-driven sales disadvantage new titles. We are seeing constant catalog sales of older 20 dollar games for 5 dollars, and 60 dollar games with DLC providing yield wins for 20 dollars. So when your new game is coming out at 20 dollars with a 10 percent discount, it does need to be pretty special to stand out from the reduced-price comps.

Most veteran devs have their cost-base too high. This one is rough. But unless you have big older games that are holding down the fort for you revenue-wise, only the truly compact will survive. Why? Because it is the compact that are having hits.

Small amounts of AAA games still break out. Here is the flipside of that.