Report: There are 908 Million PC Gamers - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 18 March 2025 / 23,252 Views
NewZoo Director Ben Porter speaking with PC Gamer has revealed some data points on the PC gaming market following a survey of 73,000 players and data from over 10,000 games.
The number of PC gamers has grown from 873.5 million players in 2023 to 907.5 million in 2024. This is bigger than the console market, which had an estimated 653.1 million in 2024.
"PC players are heavily skewed towards older, live service games," according to NewZoo data.
67 percent of player hours on PC in 2024 were spent on game that were six or more years old. 25 percents of hours were spend on games that were two to five years old, while eight percent of time was spent on games less than two years old.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2 accounted for 7.1 percent of total hours played, followed by League of Legends at 6.4 percent. In third is Roblox at 6.2 percent, while Dota 2 was in fourth with 5.8 percent, and Fortnite at 5.4 percent.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Bluesky.
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I don't think anyone is ever going to believe just how many users there are that game on PC. Not in the past, certainly not now in the present (made very clear on this site), and certainly not in the future.
With mobile phones and consoles however, that is always going to be believed, because "reasons"...
Mobile > PC > Console in terms of player base size.
We are the swarm.
Don't think it was any secret that older live-service games are the most popular games, tends to be the case on console as well where games like Minecraft, Fornite, GTA5 tend to be the mass favorites.
There are a lot but:
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/only-15-percent-of-all-steam-users-time-was-spent-playing-games-released-in-2024/
Most PC gamers don't spend very long playing games.
What kind of a “but” argument is that supposed to be? Lol. Also, if you actually read the article rather than the headline, that was 15% spent playing NEW games that were released in 2024. The other 85% were playing legacy games, which proves Pemalite's statement correct. When you see PUBG, Counter-Strike, Dota 2, or GTA V topping the player charts every day on Steam, you can see why games released in 2024 were only played 15% of the time. And 2024 was the year where Palword and Black Myth: Wukong launched on Steam and had millions of concurrent players to put it in perspective of how huge the Steam community is. Either way, using only Steam as a source for the entirety of the PC gaming community is the wrong metric though. Steam as a storefront is massive, but many games don’t use the service.
You wanna play World of Warcraft? You gotta use Battle.net. You wanna play Fortnite? You gotta use Epic Games Store. You wanna play Crossfire? (One of the biggest games in the world) you gotta download from the studios website. You wanna play Minecraft? Gotta download the launcher. You wanna play League of Legends? (Has as many monthly active users as the entirety of Steam) gotta download their launcher. You wanna play Roblox? Gotta use their launcher.
And that’s just some examples.
There’s also proprietary PC storefronts from the likes of Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, aforementioned Epic Games Store, GOG, the Xbox app/PC Game Pass, and unfortunately many others that aren’t able to be tracked the way Steam is.
But also Steam doesn’t just sell games. Whether it’s working in the mods section, live streaming, trading in the Steam market, watching movies/tv shows, or working in actual software that’s available, there’s a lot to do in Steam. On top of the incalculable metric of PC gamers having Steam running, but playing a game on a different storefront or launcher.
Probably counting everyone who ever purchased a PC dating back over many years . Plus the fact that a large number of them don’t game on PC or game anywhere. I have a Pc that I never touch for gaming.
Yes but if you strictly do not game on PC, as in you're not using any gaming clients or any such game/client that collects data from you, then you will not be counted amongst that number.
They aren't pulling numbers out of thing air...
Also just because you don't game on PC doesn't really mean much against the number that do out there.
There are 8 billion people on this planet. I cannot believe that nearly 1 in 8 are PC players.
It is an extrapolation of the survey on 73K people. I believe there must be a logic fault there.
There are many nations where consoles are priced extraordinarily high due to tariffs (I.E. Brazil)
So PC gaming tends to be significantly more popular.
Countries like China there was a ban on gaming, which really only applied to consoles, so again... PC Gaming is front and center.
Then you have countries like South Korea where "bangs" I.E. Internet Cafe's and online multiplayer PC gaming is extremely common and popular.
It was also easier for youth to convince parents to buy a PC for school, than expensive consoles.
They are using probability mathematics, it tends to be fairly accurate and 73k is a large sample size which removes outliers.
But I wonder where the survey takes place. Is the sample size e.g. done in the US, then extrapolated to worldwide? Of the 8 Billion people on the planet 10% is older then 65 and 10% is younger then 5. This already reduces it to 6 Billion people. Then there is income. Large swats would not be able to afford a PC or it would not be a priority in life. It just does not feel right.
If you followed this article into PC Gamers Article, the source of the data is from Newzoo.
Newzoo states that the data is gathered from 36 different countries.
I.E. America, Canada, Australia, China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, New Zealand, Phillipines, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and more.
The gender split is 53% male, 46% female.
It covers all age ranges.
80+ game franchises covered and has been an ongoing survey that has stretched over 10+ years with verifiable trends/data.
Hopefully that clears up your questions.
Again, you don't need to sample 8 Billion people to get accurate results, it's called Mathematics.
Man, most PC games attach rates are terrible....
Yeah, I don't buy this. Steam, the largest PC gaming platform, only has 132m monthly active users. If you add on those who use other platforms like Epic Store, GoG, Battle.net to play WoW and such, and people who play various web browser games semi regularly, you're probably looking at 250m total PC gamers at most.
All we know for sure is that the market is Mobile>PC>Console as far as marketshare. And that's probably the only information we'll ever know for sure.
I have a very hard time believing this number...
Nearly 1 out of every 8 people in the world is a PC gamer?
I've traveled all over the world and just can't see this being possible
Have you gone into people's homes and asked them what platform they game on or something in your travels? lol it is an unbelievable number to be sure, but this isn't just Windows. It's also the likes of Linux and MacOS where gaming is readily available as well. I'm sure there is something off with these numbers. Who knows what calculations they used.
I mean in pakistan and india most people don't even own a computer and their only internet access is through their phones. that's what it's like for a lot of the world's most populous countries.
A huge portion of the people I've met around the world don't even have reliable running water or electricity, let alone the luxury of a PC.
Even if this number included something like a Raspberry Pi... I still wouldn't believe this ratio
There is no doubt in my mind they are only surveying areas that would even have access to a PC which HEAVILY skews the numbers... or they are including someone who played a single computer game on a school computer 20 years ago... that doesn't make that person a PC gamer
It's pretty incredible that people don't believe it when there's such a wide variety of games and a large audience who has a computer. Playing on PC doesn't mean "owning a PC with modern GPU", so many people play old games like Sims 4, Roblox and those games listed. Heck even "Flash style" games, casuals and indies.
My partner still owns her Laptop with a laptop GPU from 2016 and she still plays games on it.
Heck there are people that still make use of integrated CPU's to play games to this day. I just cannot get why people find it impossible to perceive that PC gaming is just, well... big?. I think it's primarily down to 3 factors:
People use mobile phones daily, so some folks think they've zero time/interest to use a Laptop/Desktop
Some people still hold onto the 1980/1990 mindset, where Desktop PC's couldn't do much, weren't used as much for gaming, etc.
*Some folks perceive that PC gaming is "you have to spend 2-300k or it's not a gaming PC", so most general purpose machines get ignored/not counted for gaming by these same people.
I mean there are machines out there that cannot run AAA games, but that won't stop them from running far older games, or games like Stardew Valley, which do not require much juice to run on.
Skeptical, as that is around 11% of the world's population.
And even if that is true, a lot of that number is people like me who do light gaming in terms of specs on a normal PC.
I can't imagine even 500 million gamers use Gaming PCs, it would probably be closer to 200 million or under.
thats it? guess i need to get into PC gaming or at least give it a try
It's great when the games are running and you're playing. Not a fan of the rest. I tried to get into it but eventually just went back to consoles after 60 FPS became the norm. The main issue is old games looks like crap on console while on PC it can make old games still look amazing.
Depends on what you would get into PC gaming for. Many get into it for the ability to customize graphical settings in their games. Others get into it for the major multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike, League of Legends, etc. Others get into it for emulation (I personally emulate PS1, PS2, Dreamcast, Xbox, N64, GameCube, and Arcade games. I just got a Sinden Light Gun for games like House of the Dead and Time Crisis) Others get into it for the ability to play their games with all the mods (I still play the original Unreal Tournament but with 4K texture mods to all maps/models to make the game look modern as well as a community-run master server to play the game online with others) While others get into PC gaming just to have the best looking version of the games.
There are a lot of reasons to get into PC gaming. Ultimately, it is you getting to play your games the way you want to play them, depending on your budget. Of course, there are obvious drawbacks. Maintenance with drivers or just troubleshooting an issue you might have that isn't anywhere near as user-friendly as consoles, etc.
