PC gamers and Steam customers are "a really bright spot" as the games industry struggles with pricing and sustainability, analyst says: "We can look at an audience that's excited to try new things"
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With more games coming out every year, consumer spending largely flat for games, cost of living rising, consoles and graphics cards becoming more expensive due to component droughts (and/or tariffs), and the same live service games eating so much of the total audience's limited time and money, it ain't getting any easier for games of any size to find success. In this challenging space, Mat Piscatella, games director at analyst firm Circana, finds PC gaming and the Steam ecosystem to be a source of optimism because they continue to yield unpredictable, sustained successes.
"All of these smaller games that we saw basically grow in prominence last year – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the big one there, when it comes to games that are breaking out of what would have been, in the past, considered like a AA game, or lesser a game compared to the AAA or AAAA or AAAAA, however many they want. So I think people are becoming a little bit better at discovery, the video game players a little more comfortable with getting outside their comfort zones. Overall, I think we're seeing a shift away from tentpole, AAA, story-based games, to smaller games, or games made by smaller teams, and then the big free-to-play behemoths."
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We've seen senior developers across the industry and around the world, from Hideo Kojima to Final Fantasy's Hironobu Sakaguchi, praise Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – not just as a great game, but often as a model for more sustainable game development. Former PlayStation head Shuhei Yoshida called it an example of "the path the industry should be pursuing" at a time of ballooning production costs, complications, and risks.
Piscatella agrees it "offers a really good benchmark for all kinds of reasons," as do games like Peak and RV There Yet, part of the co-op 'friendslop' boom.
"They offer a good example to point to: we can be successful, look at them," Piscatella says.
As ever, "being successful is a bit like winning the lottery when you have this many games coming out," Piscatella observes, but the hits do keep coming. In this space, PC gaming, partly fueled by the unmatched discoverability and visibility tools of Steam, is often surfacing trends and breakouts.
"What's interesting, and gives me a lot of room for hope and optimism, is how willing the Steam audience is to try out these new things," Piscatella says. "These are games that generally come out at a relatively lower price point. These aren't $70 games. They're games that people can try, and if they don't like them, they feel comfortable ejecting or refunding or whatever. But there's a lot of room for experimentation with that Steam audience. You can see these games pop up all the time, and some of them might stick around for a bit, some of them might stick around for a couple weeks, but it's enough time for those folks who made those games to do pretty well on their investment of time and dollars.
"I think it's a really bright spot in the market right now, what's going on on PC and the willingness of the PC player to really experiment with some stuff. Whereas the consoles are much more the same games on the top of the engagement charts every week. It's a little bit more of a slower audience to move to and from, for all kinds of reasons – discovery, and just being stuck in the games they like and already having things installed, that type of thing. But I think it's really optimistic that we can look at an audience that's excited to try new things."
PC gaming has become especially important for games coming from Japan and China in recent years, but it's been on the rise globally for a long while. Piscatella notes it's "always been the most open platform," and the easiest to get into when games like Peak "run on a toaster." The nature of the platform provides some inherent insulation against the problems saddling the console market – some of which, ironically, Steam maker Valve is currently navigating as it moves toward its own hybrid living room box, the Steam Machine, and contends with component shortages.
"It just has a lot of positives, which I think is why you continue to see the PC platform as a whole continue to grow and evolve," Piscatella says. "In the US, PC content came down a little bit [in 2025], but I'm not expecting that to be the case next year. I think it's going to continue on its growth phase. And now that we have Microsoft changing strategy to focus more on a PC-first experience, or with that front end on different types of experiences, I think it's only going to continue to grow. So in that respect, it's really cool. And a lot of players, especially younger players, are choosing PC first over console in a lot of cases."
A terrifying 20,282 games were released on Steam in 2025, and just 608 managed to get 1,000 reviews, expert finds: "We might be in a bit of an indie golden age."