When figures only tell a portion of the whole story…

Every week or so, Matt Piscatella releases figures on the most played games in the US on PlayStation, Xbox as well as Steam in the US, Canada and Mexico. These figures show the same games on the whole take up the majority of the playtime across all users. These are mostly Gaas (Games as a Service) games or games like GTA5 and Minecraft that are long-term favourites. Every now and then a new game flitters into the top 10 (such as Ghost of Yotai and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33). Not all of these games are free to play (Battlefield 6,Helldivers 2 and ARC Raiders are a notable exceptions), but games like Fortnite, Roblox, Apex Legends and Rocket League are always present. Yearly sports games are in here as well with NBA, Madden and College Football in the US and I imagine EA’s FC games would be up there in the UK and Europe if similar figures were released there as well.

He also recently released a comparison of the top played games of 2025 and 2024 and to nobodies surprise the list is almost identical. COD, Fortnite, Minecraft, GTA5 and Roblox and are the top played games for both years on both consoles. These are just on Xbox and PlayStation and do not include Steam where the list may be a little more open. The full results will be released on the 22nd January 2026.

People find these figures interesting and they are, but I feel people failed to realise that this is one piece of a puzzle and only shows a small insight into what is actually happening in the games industry. There are so many factors to take into account but this small facit of the data, as huge as the data set is, is not a complete picture of the industry. As with all statistics, it really depends on the question you want to ask or have answered. This is effectively just what were the most played games. That’s it.

What I see people doing with this data is using it to answer questions that the data is not able to answer with the limited information we as outsiders have. Circana are a business and as such, to use their full service you need to pay, as with any business. Depending on what you would like to know about the games industry, depends on the question you ask the data and which selection of data you use. If you want to know, for instance, the best-selling single player games of 2025, you would not include all the sports games and Gaas games. If you were focussing on the product that would give you your best return on your investment, you would focus on the gross profit of all the industry.

But for some reason people decide to use the data of ‘Most Played Games’ to dictate the state of the industry. They ignore the huge increase of player base across all ecosystems (from about 400M in 2006 to over 3Bil in 2025 not including mobile), the number of people who play on multiple platforms and older generations, the sheer number of games being released (whether they are good or bad 20K games released on Steam alone last year) and so many other factors that need to be included or excluded depending on what you would like to know or understand.

Now I am not claiming that Mat Piscetella doesn’t know this. I am aware that he is aware of this and is essentially putting out information he finds interesting and believes others would find interesting too. But this is only a small portion of the data and analytics that we need to do to detail any actual defining assessment of the gaming industry. We need to establish what it is we would like to know and what data actually indicates how healthy the gaming industry is. For businesses the industry is doing well(ish). They have AI to replace many developers and artists in the gaming industry, They have laid off many of their staff they feel are surplus to requirement, most have a game that generates recurring money (some have multiple and often with growth that pleases investors), spending on games is predicted to have increased by a 3-7.5% worldwide in 2025 (£5.4Bil in the UK a 7.4% increase) and so on. The big takeaway here is that if they were doing as badly as people make out, all these C-level execs would have been fired ages ago. Most of them have been in post for many years (Phil Spencer since 2014, Andrew Willson of EA since 2013, Herman Hulst at PlayStation since 2019 in various roles etc.) and of course Bobby Kotick was in charge since 1991 until he walked away after the buyout.

All these numbers mean nothing to your average gamer, generally less so to the people who log on to play those top played games. There are others, like myself and many who decry the end of the games industry, that are concerned about this. Most of that money is from mobile and then the eternal GaaS games that print money for the companies that own them. But again there is no information on how the games that us real ‘Capital G Gamers’ want did, as such. There is a smattering of information out there that your average person can access. Information on sales, budgets, consecutive player counts, monthly active users and so on but nothing you can use to generate a definitive overview. The information released to the public is generally curated to ensure the general public sees what the company wants them to see and so investors do not get cold feet.

The basics of this is the fact that as Joe Public we do not have the requisite information necessary to actually make the claims we make. From the outside it looks dire to gamers as workers are being laid off, games don’t seem to be selling, budgets are ballooning, subscriptions are taking off, games are being cancelled and so on. Dire news is brought to us everyday by people who don’t have all the facts. I don’t think the industry is in good health from our point of view as ‘Gamers’ but we had a huge amount of great games release last year enough to make people’s game of the year lists hugely controversial. The amount of games that received a mostly positive to overwhelmingly positive rating on steam is truly incredible (so many of games that have a lot of positive reviews are games that I have never heard of).

SteamDB has an incredible amount of data on there that again is interesting but, depending on what it is you would like to know, can be useful or completely irrelevant. For instance as I write this Counter-Strike 2 has 1.2Mil players in game, the next closest is DOTA 2 with 600K and then PUBG (540K) and then ARC Raiders (150K). Couter-Strike 2 and DOTA 2 are only available on Steam so that explains the numbers whereas the others are available elsewhere. Fortnite is not available on the Steam Platform, so those numbers are not there, and I don’t know where to find them. But how are these statistics useful? To us as gamers? Not very other than stating that these games are really popular. The first single player game on the most played games list is Stardew Valley of all games (number 10). Also, Grand Theft Auto 5 is on there twice with the Legacy and Enhanced editions totalling 175K players together (94K in Legacy and 81K in Enhanced).

Now if you want to know the state of the gaming industry and how that relates to single player experiences, well this doesn’t tell you much other than Stardew Valley has staying power (well done ConcernedApe!). It also shows that many of the games that are on this list are older games. The first game to come out in 2025 on the list is Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 at 49 beaten by games like Baldur’s Gate 3 (21), Slay the Spire (30), Red Dead 2 (31), Cyberpunk (33) and Terraria (46 with ModLoader at 40) all older games. Again, what does this tell us other than people play older games? Not much without context. Three of the single player games I mentioned are long RPGs that have replay-ability and Terraria is a notoriously replay-able game.

There is also the report that people are buying less games which would make sense as to why they are playing free to play games and older games. Many people have significant if not enormous backlogs (I am holding up my hand here at the last one) and due to tight budgets are deciding only to spend money on new games that are of exceptional quality. Again, without actual data to back this up, this is just conjecture at best.

I think this explains what I see in game discourse at the moment, that if a game isn’t a 10/10 people criticize it. Outer Worlds 2 (70% Mostly Positive), South of Midnight (90% Very Positive), Ghost of Yotai (no Steam reviews but 8.1 on Metacritic), Assassins Creed Shadows (70% Mostly Positive), Avowed (75% Mostly positive) and so on, were all made out to be failures by the discourse online. But were all actually well received by most. I have to remind myself that the vocal minority in gaming do not speak for the majority. That is why Fortnite and COD (Black Ops 7 only has a 52% rating on Steam) are some of the biggest games in the world.

Majority of people who play games on any device, play these long-term games. Gaming has changed from the industry (if you can even call it that) I grew up with and the people that play games now would never have played games in the 80s and 90s even early 2000s. Gaming has become a more acceptable hobby over the years. According to this GamesIndustry.biz article Circana stated that 71% of US engage with video games. That is a seismic shift from when I started playing. Many of these people play on mobile (my son plays Roblox on mobile when he cannot get to the Xbox but has started to shift away from this towards games like Terraria thank goodness!). When people comment on the gaming industry we need to be more thoughtful of their reasons and use more critical thinking when it comes to what people claim as facts. More and more I see ‘facts’ twisted to feed a narrative or shore up a person’s beliefs than to actually add to the gaming conversation.

The thrust of this thought piece is that we come across people online detailing small bits of data with little to no context added and claiming this encapsulates what is going on in the industry. We need to read into this data that is being presented and critically access if it says what people say it says. Often the data only shows a small section of the industry and cannot always be used to extrapolate out to show a more general overview.