Revealed: the top new PC & console games of 2025
Publikováno: 16.12.2025
Also: the number of game releases in 2025 and a lotta discovery news.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
It’s the last week of the year for ‘doing proper work’ - and frankly, some of you may be winding down already. But we have two GameDiscoverCo newsletters left to send, and by golly, we’re going to send them!
Before we start: the Sega Channel was a ‘way ahead of its time’ ‘90sGame Pass-style sub service for Genesis consoles - using cable TV infra to distribute games. And the Video Game History Foundation just debuted an hour-long doc and 100+ new ROMs, documenting its entire history. (Amazing stuff.)
[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a gratis demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today-~85 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]
News: 2025’s most-played new Steam games…
Let’s finish the year off in style with this cornucopia of platform & discovery news, shall we?
Our latest column ($) for the This Week In Video Games crew (Skill Up & friends) analyzes “the games in 2025 that sold >100k units on Steam, ranked by largest median playtime.” And here (above) is GDCo’s raw data for it, with Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Monster Hunter Wilds & Dune: Awakening all >45 hours median.
ICYMI: The Game Awards’ actual awards part was dominated by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which “cleaned up in nine of the 10 categories it was up for”, inc. Game Of The Year. And: “Donkey Kong Bananza won the family game award… Arc Raiders won best multiplayer… Hollow Knight: Silksong was named best action-adventure.”
The Verge caught up with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney after his latest Apple court ‘win’. The iOS App Store may be able to charge “reasonable fees for purchases made in apps using outside payment links”, but Sweeney says it “completely shuts down… Apple’s theory that they should be able to charge arbitrary junk fees [like 27%] for access.”
One other December streaming showcase was last week’s Wholesome Snack from the Wholesome Games crew, highlighting 25 titles, including the brand-new ‘chill electronic repair’ game ReStory. (Cozy game fans are discussing highlights, inc. thrift store manager Thrifty Business & period boarding house sim Wylde Society.)
Xbox’s Matt Booty sat for an anodyne Variety interview, teasing new Xbox Dev Direct streaming showcases in early 2026, boasting that “six of the top 10 games on PlayStation were our Xbox games” from the end of April to end of June, and saying “right now… we don’t have any pricing updates” on $80 games in Xbox’s future.
Our ‘top games of November’ Roblox round-up from Creator Games is all here on LinkedIn this month: mining/crafting title The Forge (here’s a video) is the new hotness, as “Fish It! continues to punch above its weight in engagement.” (Top games by $ were Steal A Brainrot, 99 Nights In The Forest, and FPS Rivals.)
New ‘browser-first platform for high-end PC game’ Wavedash just launched. Here’s the official announce, and the first title you can buy on it is Parking Garage Rally Circuit DX by Walaber. Next up for ‘em: “adding masterpiece games, improving our developer tools, and building richer multiplayer and social features.”
Switch eShop hit Tiny Bookshop ran into content rating problems, as a physical version re-rating over a text-based ‘arsehole’ bumped it from ESRB E to T, and the eShop pulled it for weeks as a result. (We discussed this issue in 2021 - the system is sketch, so you have to be careful about self-rating yourself too low on IARC.)
Amazon Games continues to stroll away from internal studio ownership, with news that Ubisoft “is acquiring the team behind an upcoming MOBA at Amazon Games Montreal”, including MOBA March Of Giants, with “the original creative director of Rainbow Six Siege” coming back to Ubi as part of the deal.
Looks like Meta isn’t pushing quite so hard with the $ loss-leading on VR hardware like the Quest 3, with an internal memo suggesting: “Our devices will be more premium in price going forward, but we’ll have a healthier business to anchor on and free ourselves from feeling existential about any singular device’s success.”
Microlinks: you can get a Lara Croft wetsuit in-game costume (!) for Legacy Of Atlantis when “linking your Amazon Games iD account to a Steam/PSN/Xbox account”; Fortnite is now back in the Google Play Store, so no more Android sideloading needed; Roblox added A/B testing and throttling for beta versions.
In-depth: the top new PC/console games of 2025
As we did back in 2024 and also in 2023, GameDiscoverCo likes to end the year with our YTD estimates of the top-selling new video games of the calendar year so far. We’ve been talking about a lot of these games already - but here’s where they rank!
Let’s start out with the top new Steam games of 2025 by units sold, which includes a fair amount of lower-priced titles - and plenty of more expensive ones too:
The general trends here? We have some thoughts:
The rise of ‘friendslop’ is one obvious megatrend: R.E.P.O, Peak, (the co-optional) Schedule I, and RV There Yet? all rocked the co-op friendly ‘goofy fun times’ bandwagon straight into the Top 10 by units. (Also: Mage Arena in the Top 20.)
The big (sometimes gritty) action RPG still reigns: from Monster Hunter Wilds through Elden Ring Nightreign to Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Oblivion Remastered, players will pay $60-$70 for a ‘tens of hours’ high-budget epic.
Unique titles are still breaking through, too: games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Split Fiction, Dispatch, Hollow Knight: Silksong and Megabonk in the Top 20 show some pretty diverse genres making it through the horde of games.
Otherwise, we note Battlefield 6 and ARC Raiders (as well as Borderlands 4) being the big shooter standouts of the year, and the presence of ‘huge in China’ titles like Escape From Duckov and Revenge On Gold Diggers. Fascinating.
To give you an idea of scale - all of the games in the above chart (except one) sold >2 million units on Steam, and seven of them sold >5 million units. (Helped by cheaper games, this is an increase on 2024’s numbers, where 14 sold >2m and only 4 sold >5m.)
Let’s go to ‘top new paid Steam games by revenue in 2025’ now (above). BTW, there were no new F2P games on Steam in 2025 that would have made this list - closest were Umamusume: Pretty Derby and Where Winds Meet, both just outside the Top 20.)
As you’d expect, you mainly see rank boosts from games that are more expensive (or also have IAP, in one or two cases), with Battlefield 6, Monster Hunter and ARC Raiders now making up the Top 3, closely followed by Clair Obscur.
And further down, titles like Civilization VII, Dying Light: The Beast, and Dune: Awakening make it onto the overall Top 20, due to their more premium pricing. (We think everything in this chart grossed >$50m on Steam, with 13 games at >$100m.)
Next up, we have the top new PlayStation paid games (outside of PS+) across 2025. And as you can see, evergreen sports games significantly move up compared to Steam, due to the more casual TV-playing audience. Soccer, basketball, and 2x American football games are in the Top 10 - with more soccer & F1 in the Top 20.
You can also see major crossover titles with Steam, from Battlefield and Monster Hunter to Elden Ring, Split Fictions, and ARC Raiders. What is different is a handful of PlayStation-first exclusives - inc. Ghost Of Yotei & Death Stranding 2, and later console additions like tactical shooter Ready Or Not & Xbox port Forza Horizon 5.
(For reference, we have all of the Top 20 selling >1m copies on PlayStation, with 14 selling >2m copies, 8 selling >3m, and the top four selling >5m. Only just missing the Top 20 were Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Mafia: The Old Country, Silksong & Borderlands 4.)
Next, a quick stroll through the Xbox console paid catalog top new games for 2025, which echoes a lot of the top-end reliance on sports games (even more so!), but also shows shooters like Ready Or Not and ARC Raiders ranking with core Xbox players.
The gap down from PlayStation sales is notable. But the Top 10 new games still sold >1 million units on Xbox this year. And everything in the Top 20 beat 300k units or so - which is still meaningful, if you traffick in a certain type of game.
It’s also worth taking a look briefly at Xbox Game Pass titles, and we confirm Xbox’s announce that Clair Obscur is the most-downloaded third party GP title of 2025. (It’s neck-and-neck with the Oblivion remaster for most popular new GP game.)
There are, of course, plenty of other first party Xbox titles in the ‘most popular on Game Pass’ list, from Grounded 2 through DOOM: The Dark Ages and beyond. Leading third-party GP titles included Rematch, Sniper Elite: Resistance, Slime Rancher 2, and Silksong. (We think the whole Top 20 had >1m players, with some approaching 5m.)
Finally, we looked at Switch eShop sales for new games in 2025, focusing on the Western market. This is obviously missing physical data, which favors first party games - but there are still eight Nintendo-published titles in the Top 20.
The third-party games make sense: from console-friendly titles like Silksong & Hades II through cozy games like Hello Kitty Island Adventure & Tiny Bookshop, as well as JRPG-adjacent titles like Fantasy Life & Deltarune. (We’re not sure sales are giant tho, with >250k units the bottom end of these charts, and top third-parties pushing 1m.)
How many PC/console games debuted in 2025?
We also wanted to talk about PC/console release cadence. The excellent folks at SteamDB just published this mid-December look at total Steam releases since 2016. As you can see, 2025 will again be an all-time high for new games, at nearly 20,000.
They also note: “Almost half of them have fewer than ten reviews”, going on to comment that, according to their public data set: “The number of games hitting 100+ reviews is growing, but slowly.” (Games will get extra reviews over time, obviously.)
Overall, we see the most important trend as a) the competitive games in your particular category, b) the price of those games, and c) the number of total titles available. So, another 20% more titles to choose from were added in 2025, abstractly…
That’s Steam - but how about console? GameDiscoverCo keeps its own spreadsheet of multi-year trends - here’s the new games released per year on current platforms:
What we’re seeing here - even in mid-December - is yet more year-over-year growth, with one exception. In addition to the aforementioned 2% YoY increase in Steam games to >19,000 new games (and ~120k total) in 2025, around 350 per week, we have:
New Switch 1/2 titles were up 8% YoY to >3,100 during the year: that’s about 60 new games per week, and the total # of available eShop games hit >17,600.
New PlayStation 4/5 titles were up 4% YoY to >1,300: though 2022 had more new PS games, that’s ~25 new games per week, and a total of >9,900.
New Xbox console games were down 20% YoY to nearly 900: there’s ~20 new per week, and now 7,800 Xbox games. (This year was also less than 2023’s release #.)
And yes, total number of games isn’t a perfect indication of where the market is. (There’s lots of semi-pro titles mixed in, esp. on Steam & Switch - the latter also has a fair amount of ‘shovelware’ from prolific trend-chasers, as does PlayStation at times.)
But anecdotally, looking at the AAA trailers at The Game Awards last week, there was a lot more ‘Steam & PlayStation’-first end slates, we felt. So the Xbox dip makes sense, especially given hardware sales slowdowns, and Xbox as a platform de-emphasizing dedicated hardware as the only place to find their first-party games.
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]