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The global video game industry had a turnover of around $185 billion in 2024 and continues to grow. But there is a catch: this growth does not reach the studios or the area that traditional players look at, those of the console wars and the old PC Master Race. Matthew Ball’s usual annual report leaves a less complacent diagnosis: revenue is concentrated in China, on platforms like Roblox and on the owners of mobile operating systems. The rest survive as best they can. The Old Times (2021): There is still talk about how great the year 2021 was for video games. It seems like it was yesterday when the pandemic (insert meme of Grandpa Simpson telling stories to the kids here) confined hundreds of millions of people to their homes, and games (mobile, console, PC, free, subscription) absorbed the benefits of that confinement. As Ball, CEO of Epyllion, analyzes in The State of Video Gaming in 2025the factors that drove that peak were an extraordinary sum of factors: mobile platforms, free-to-play models, games as a service, the cross play and new genres like battle royale and social play. Downhill. The flip side of that was a much bigger recession than expected: global spending on video games fell 3.5% in 2022 and barely recovered a few percentage points towards the end of 2024. According to the consulting firm MIDiA Research, the sector had enjoyed growth of 26.3% in 2020 and 9.8% in 2021, and the rebound was inevitable. According to Ball, the engines that had driven the industry between 2011 and 2021 stopped all at once: the smartphones They were no longer surprising with each interaction, social networks were paralyzed, the free-to-play was normalized. 6.5% of total gaming time in 2023 corresponded to new video games, says Ball, and only four titles shared half of that percentage. Layoffs in full force. He report also speaks how the sector’s layoffs since 2022 illustrate this adjustment: more than 44,000 jobs, 61% of them concentrated in North America. This does not mean that it is the end of the industry or that the same pattern is being repeated. crash 1983, as has been said (the industry is too diversified and globalized to repeat a systemic collapse of that magnitude). What we are paying is the cost of having built a structure designed for an industry in continuous growth during the pandemic. The Chinese monster. Ball puts on the table that global spending on video games grew by approximately $10 billion between 2021 and 2025. But… where did that money go? The report assures that to Beijing: about 4,000 million of that growth is from the Chinese market, and another 1,500 million are from titles developed in China sold in international markets. In total, Chinese publishers have racked up about half of global growth since 2019. And there are more data: Gamer spending in China reached $49.2 billion in 2024, with a base of 722 million active gamers, more than double the total population of the United States. China is already the first market in the world by income. Not foreigners. Very significantlythat market remains almost closed to foreign games. 84% of Chinese gamers’ spending goes on titles produced in China, and that percentage has increased, as unusual as it may seem: 20% of Chinese domestic spending goes on imported titles (a figure that also registered a decrease of 5% between 2023 and 2024). It is comparable to what happens with cinemawith local films devouring foreign ones at the box office. A situation favored by a combination of factors: First, the Chinese regulatory framework favors national titles through a licensing system; second, development costs are substantially lower than in the West; Finally, the work culture of the country’s studios allows for more intensive production cycles. You don’t have to dig far to find examples of great Chinese international successes: ‘Genshin Impact‘, from miHoYo, raised more than $3.5 billion in its first year70% outside China with a character design rooted in anime. ‘Honor of Kings‘, from Tencent, dominated the Chinese mobile market for years before making the international leap with adaptations of character names. AND ‘Black Myth: Wukong‘, developed with support from Tencent, sold ten million copies in its first three days launching in August 2024, betting on the opposite of assimilation: an unequivocally Chinese mythology without thematic concessions to Western taste. Roblox sweeps. The numbers sing: 70% of the growth of the video game market outside of China in 2025 was absorbed by ‘Roblox‘. Which is an infrastructure on which millions of creators build interactive experiences using the platform’s own tools. Players access it for free and spend real money on cosmetic items and access within these worlds, transactions that are carried out in Robux, the ecosystem’s virtual currency. Of every dollar spent,’Roblox’ historically retained around 70% leaving the creator with approximately 25 or 30 cents. In September 2024, ‘Roblox’ announced a new delivery model for paid games that increases the creator’s commission up to 70% on titles that sell for $49.99. What does this translate into? In 2024, ‘Roblox’ paid around $923 million to its creators (an increase of 25% compared to 2023), while its total revenue grew by 29% until reaching 3.6 billion dollars. Its intentions are colossal: CEO David Baszucki stated that the company’s goal is to capture 10% of the global video game content market. Some more questions. Just to finish outlining the portrait: ‘Roblox’ registers sustained net losses (a accumulated deficit of 3.5 billion) with the logic of the platform in the expansion phase, sacrificing immediate profitability. Some observers they point because ‘Roblox’ has become the video game equivalent of YouTube, a platform that extracts value from the work of its creators in the form of data, advertising and infrastructure. And one last thing: two titles on the platform (‘Blox Fruits’ and ‘Brookhaven RP’) each accumulate 60% of the monthly gaming hours of all of Electronic Arts. 30%. If the global video game market reached an all-time high in … Read more