Newzoo's Inflection Point Report: Three Things Worth Arguing About

I sat down with Ben Porter, Newzoo’s Director of Consulting, for a private walk through of their 2026 PC and Console report. Newzoo calls it an inflection point. I read 80 pages and saw something else: winner-take-more on a flat engagement base. 

Revenue is up, hours played are not. PC compounds, console spikes on blockbusters and sags between them. Ben mostly agreed with the framing, with a couple of fair caveats: 

• Newzoo's engagement data doesn't include Nintendo, and Switch 2 launched into this period. 

• Newzoo’s data doesn’t show key Asian markets, like China for example.

Even so, the top 20 still aggregates most of the playtime and most of the revenue.

1. Roblox is the #1 franchise on PC and console

Picture this: Roblox is the most played “game” on PC and console.  

Roblox players index 0.62x on Ghost of Yotei, 0.68x on Assassin's Creed Shadows, and 0.64x on Clair Obscur. Here’s how you can read this: Sandbox (Roblox and Minecraft) games didn't grow the pie, total playtime across PC, PlayStation and Xbox actually shrunk 1% year over year. It pulled 27% out of Battle Royale and 5% out of Shooter. 

On the podcast, Ben offered three explanations: 

1. Roblox skews young

2. AAA titles are paid (aversion or inability) 

3. And most importantly, taste. Roblox players are socially driven creatures who over-index on Among Us, Stumble Guys, and the "friend slop" category like Peak, Repo and Schedule 1. 

The gateway theory, that Roblox kids graduate to mid-core mobile and eventually PC, is wishful thinking. If you're an AAA studio underwriting a future migration to your catalog, you're betting on a transition the data does not support.

Gateway theory is broken. Neither Roblox nor Minecraft players are growing up and switching highly social UGC experiences on AAA narratives.  

Ben is similarly skeptical and said Newzoo is actively working with clients to figure out where Roblox players actually go when they leave, if they leave at all. His sharper point: Roblox is a platform that can reinvent itself at any moment, so the audience can mature inside Roblox without ever touching a console game. 

2. Free-to-play on console is quietly dying

Ben corrected me here, and the correction is the story. F2P is not the same as live service. First one is a free game monetizing purely with microtransactions (ex. Fortnite). Second refers to a title you purchase before playing and then do micro transaction inside of it (ex. Arc Raiders).

PC F2P revenue per playing hour rose 10% year over year. On PlayStation and Xbox, F2P revenue fell faster than engagement, ouch. Meanwhile pay-to-play live service (Call of Duty, Battlefield, EAFC, NBA 2K, Helldivers, Arc Raiders) rose to a four-year peak.

Console microtransactions are roughly 25% of spending and come mostly from premium live service. PC microtransactions are roughly 50% and come mostly from F2P.* 

The Game Pass tension isn't hidden in footnotes of the report either. Clair Obscur and Oblivion are both top five $30-to-$50 games on PC and PlayStation, and neither cracks Xbox's top five because Game Pass eats premium revenue. 

My read is: if you know you have a banger, you don't put it on Game Pass. Which means Game Pass is structurally a home for games their own developers don't believe will be hits. Subscription service with back catalog and new releases that aren’t the most desired ones is a problem that gets worse with time.

*Roblox revenue on PC isn't in the dataset due to a payments change Newzoo hasn't accommodated yet. Roblox is also the most-played PC game at 9.7% of total playtime. Strip the biggest F2P object out of your revenue-per-hour math and PC's F2P efficiency story gets less clean.

3. The mid-price renaissance is real, but…

The $30 to $50 band on PlayStation grew 99% from 2022 to 2025. Clair Obscur, Helldivers 2, Arc Raiders, Schedule I, Split Fiction, Oblivion Remastered, Elden Ring Nightreign all sit there. 

In the podcast, I pushed Ben that this was a quality and business model story, not a pricing story. He pushed back, and he's partly right. Price is itself a business-model decision. He asked the unanswerable counterfactual: would Clair Obscur have sold as well at $70? Probably not. Net new IP from an unproven studio. 

The composition matters more than the growth rate. You have one net-new IP (Clair Obscur), one premium live service AAA (Arc Raiders), one AAA remaster (Oblivion), one AAA spinoff (Elden Ring Nightreign), and a clutch of indie or co-op friend-slop. Different games solving for different problems with the same price tag. 

The real signal is that publishers without franchise leverage or unproven IP can't credibly ask $70, so they price to increase conversion and monetize the engaged tail separately. 

Despite all the success cases, Steam is a rough place to operate in. Roughly 19,000 games launched on Steam in 2025. Fewer than a third even crossed the ~$5,000 revenue threshold needed to unlock Steam achievements. All while just 80 games make up 80% of all PC playtime. The winners in the $30-50 segment is by definition a survivorship study. If you're a studio reading this band as a strategy, don’t ignore the corpses underneath it.