The New Era of Social Gaming

So, I want to talk about some of these indie games we kind of you kind of mentioned them a little bit and you talked about Repo or r e p o. We talked about Peak a little bit. They are the second and third largest or best-selling PC console games of 2025s. And so, the question there is not only how incredible this is for these clearly indie games to beat Monster Hunter Wilds, Hogwarts Legacy, Red Dead Redemption 2, and so forth. But, what is it about these sort of a content creator and friend group experiences that resonates so strongly with players today? Yeah, I I would say that these games understand that probably the core PC console gamer experience in 2026 is social with friends. Repo and Peak, these are designed to be played with a small group of friends getting on Discord regularly specifically to play with each other. This is just how so many people in Gen Alpha and Gen Z to Millennials play

today. These games create moments where everyone is laughing and yelling at each other that kind of define the ultimate gaming night that everyone wants to have. Competition, obviously huge motivator for a lot of people driving motivation behind a lot of very successful games, but there are so many competitive experiences out there already. It feels like the market might be saturated there and not everyone wants a competitive experience all the time. So, playing on a team with friends in in contrast, I feel like it's something almost every social gamer enjoys. These games tap into that. As it happens, all of these attributes also make these games attractive to streamers and influencers who give these indie games the reach that they need to cut through the noise and go viral. When you're laughing and yelling at other streamers you're collabing with, there's humor in these games, horror, high-stakes moments like falling off the side of the mountain. These all give creators something to react to, generate the clips they need to attract new viewers to the channels. And when these new viewers and established audiences see the game and say, "Hey, that looks fun. I want to play." They go back and sell it to their friends. Another viral moment, it costs $10 or less, which actually might play better with some audiences than free-to-play, making the process pretty frictionless and

increasing the virality factor. I'll also mention that graphics aren't as important as they might have been in the past. The younger generations are playing Roblox, which isn't exactly photorealistic.
not. They prize the social experience of the game above the graphics, at at least for this type of gaming. And that's not to say there isn't a market for high-definition triple-A games. Obviously, there is, but when the visual change compared to games from 10 years ago is not that big, it's hard to make graphics a selling point. It's just not that possible to blow everyone's minds, you know, like Final Fantasy 10 cutscenes when that came out. The gap The gap is just not that big.
Yeah. I I will say that it wasn't just these two These They're probably the best examples, but it wasn't just indie games that capitalized on this friend group content creator wave. Our creators, I would say, is part of this wave as well. Very playable solo, but great co-op with friends experience as well. Uh I would also say, anecdotally, for me, Claire Obscure Expedition 33, despite being a single-player RPG game, was also a friend experience for me because my friends and I, we recommended this game to everyone else. We recommended it to each other. We streamed it to each other on Discord. We talked about the story, listened to the soundtrack, cosplayed the characters even. Uh so, I feel like the era of social

media virality means there's There's so much noise, but there's also a lot of potential for someone and something genuinely moves a lot of people deeply and inspires them to share and speak out.
And apart from this sort of a word-of-mouth that you described, have you seen more professional streaming, sharing, maybe even ads? Like, I don't know if you use TikTok, but have you seen a lot of this content, this sort of indie content on TikTok? Uh I Sadly, I don't use TikTok. Maybe I should start. To be honest, one of the the main spaces that I do happen to follow is the Japanese streaming space. One really interesting thing that they do there is they have these big collab events where they're all get on a Minecraft server or a GTA server or something and all play with each other. So, I feel like these experiences, social experiences, are also seeing huge adoption in among streaming circles, but also it's it spreads and, you know, GTA 5 is still one of the biggest games in the world by by MAU. Yeah. No, it's I'm I'm just asking because if something is organically shareable, then that usually means that the network share or the

platform, however you want to call it, the overlords, you can call But but these platforms see that they're being shared and so they jump on it and create products around it to make the sharing monetizable.
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I see. And uh if the content is shareable, then then I'm sure there there's going to be different type of tools to to make it easier. So, you must be playing in an in a social Uh just saying that you're a true fan. And in addition to playing these indie games, especially the 3D and so forth, you've probably been playing also the AAA games, the ones from the big publishers. How are they viewing, in your opinion, these smaller highly social experiences? Do you think that they're taking a page out of their viral playbooks or are they still kind of going for those blockbuster moments? I think that they're still doubling down on these massive blockbusters. These are the the moments that really make them work, I think, as as a business model. Pique is

probably the biggest success of the social archetype of the year, but at $8 per unit, that's only like 60 million post Steam cut. So, they would need like a bunch of those to really make a huge impact. They're still definitely doing the AAA games. That said, the the ROI of a game like Pique really attractive, obviously. So, I think we are seeing some experimentation with smaller social formats. Obviously, there's things like Hazelight, EA, that It Takes Two, split fiction, great successes. They had the whole whole friend pass as well, which which I think was was a great idea. So, they're great successes, not enough to single-handedly warp revenue like like Battlefield 6 might. But lastly, I would say that AAA blockbusters in games riding the social trend don't necessarily need to be separate things. Just because social experiences don't need amazing graphics, doesn't mean players will reject a game for having my I appreciate the fifth largest game by average 2025 now and still one of the most streamed games in the world as I mentioned before is Grand Theft Auto 5 legacy, deeply social experience. And I fully expect Grand Theft Auto 6 to be almost the culmination of this trend despite the assumed AAA price. With the existing GTA

audience adopting the game, so many new people coming in, streamers adopting it, friend groups playing it, and just creating a huge gravitational pull.
And with GTA 6 coming in and probably having that that online capability from the get-go at least pretty quickly after the launch, that's going to be a huge time sink. With with everybody owning the other main game as well. We haven't talked about mobile, so let's talk about mobile now. So, here I have a bunch of graphs and this is showing basically the trends that most of the listeners know. It talks about mobile gaming revenue rising only by 1% despite the downloads essentially falling. And here we can see the in-app purchase revenue over the levels of 2022. I don't know if they're about at the level sweet 21, which seemed to be at sort of a peak levels. Yes, we can inflation adjust and it probably will be significantly lower, etc., etc. But the story is that the market is not growing in terms of in-app purchases. Of course, we don't know the

effect of web shops at least yet. I'm sure Sensor Tower is working on that. We don't know the size of in-app ad market really and the effect of that. But what we can see is it's sort of extreme maturity and with downloads declining and total hours spent kind of plateauing as well, it's unlikely that we are going to see growth anytime soon, right? That's fair to say. That's definitely the pattern we're seeing. But your question earlier, Sensor Tower is devoted to measuring the digital economy and we are going to try to be covering the entire gaming space. So, I'm really excited to see what I can show you guys next year in State of Gaming honestly. But yeah, it's definitely mature and when I delve a little bit deeper into it, looks like this is consolidation of growth. So, the share of revenue for the top 25 and the top 50 and the top 10 or top 100 didn't really change drastically year-over-year. Top 25 and top 50 actually ticked down a little bit in revenue share of the whole market, but growth is concentrated in the top 50 for sure. So, the top 50 accounted for 180% of that 1% revenue

growth in 2025. That means that the rest of the market as a whole it's kind of a more nuanced story that I don't want to get into too much detail here, but another stat that I thought was interesting. 24% of 2025's top 50 were not in the top 50 in 2024. So, it's not like that it's all the same games. There's some movement there as well as the, you know, Last War Survival and White Out taking the number one and number two spots. They were in the top 10 I believe in 2024 as well, but that's still quite a jump up into number one and number two. On top of that, number of games clearing revenue thresholds is shrinking. So, for example, the number of games with revenue above 100 million per year in 2025 that dropped 4%. So, yes, top-level trend kind of just boring 1% growth, but the growth was concentrated into these top 50 games. The middle feels like it's thinning. It does definitely feels like it's it's harder to scale in 2025 than 2024. Do you have a hypothesis what the reason is for the market maturity? Is it the IDFA? Is it that we are just not growing because everybody has already the latest

device and we've downloaded the games that we keep playing? Is it as Supercell CEO famously had in his blog post that the West is just not innovating? Like what is it? I would say honestly like a lot of the things that you say sound pretty plausible. Like market saturation, everyone has a smartphone. IDFA is certainly a thing where it's harder to to target and and get those high-value players in your game and it's requiring different strategies to really succeed and scale compared to previous times when before IDFA. One thing that that stay to my mind as you said that really all the growth of the market and overall the revenue is going more and more towards that top 50 publishers, right? The 1% growth, it's not a lot of growth, but most of that growth did go into these these top 50. But the the revenue share of this top 50 is actually about the same year over year, interesting.
Got it. How much is the revenue share of the total market? It's like 76, maybe? I remember it's a lot, but it's not as much as on PC. So, PC is even more concentrated, which is funny because

often times you would hear that mobile developers, because it's so difficult on mobile, so difficult to scale, so difficult to find your niche. These publishers are looking at PC as a gold child because they are looking at the peaks and and the other indie titles doing so well, and they're thinking that hey, we can come in with all our knowledge, but PC's even more concentrated than mobile. And even harder to advertise than on mobile, despite the idea of it. Yeah, I believe that for sure. Another thing about these graphs that you have here is when you look at the time spent alongside the revenue, do you have a hypothesis of the story here? Because on the time spent, total hours spent is relatively stable now for the couple of years. They have purchased revenue is slightly growing. Downloads are going down. It almost I would say that players are spending more time in existing games, and those existing games are monetizing better. Yeah, that makes sense to me, especially whenever the a lot of the growth is

getting concentrated in these these top 50 games. It also sort of depends on which genre and in region you have, too. Strategy was actually the only genre to grow downloads year over year, I believe, and that's especially across three regions, North America, Asia, and Europe. So, some other genres, shooters, look maybe squeeze shapes revenue up. Time is flat or down in most most regions, so that's kind of higher revenue per dollar. Maybe that's just higher efficiency. There's a lot of new launches like like Delta Force on the market, especially in China. So, yeah, different markets telling some some different stories adding up to like 1.3% increase in revenue, 0.9% increase in time spent.
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