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Many of the same games top revenue and playtime charts across platforms every year as time and money are concentrated in evergreen live service titles, but a new report says you can find greater, increasing diversity and long-tail popularity in PC gaming.
Newzoo analysts, per market analysis manager Tianyi Gu, report that PC is the only observed platform where over 50% of revenue comes from games outside the top 20 – a full 56% in 2025 for Western markets, in fact, and that's up from 48% in 2022.
As PC Gamer spotted, Gu published an analysis of Newzoo's newly released (free to request) 2026 PC and console gaming report. PC gaming, which fellow analyst Mat Piscatella of Circana has separately described as a bright spot for diversity in games, is a clear standout. "The market remains concentrated, but the space below the Top 20 is becoming more important," Gu writes. And nobody makes this clearer than PC gamers, who are spending more time and money on less popular games, which are often older.
"Titles such as Path of Exile 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II sit alongside durable catalogue games like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Skyrim, which is still generating meaningful playtime well over a decade after release," Gu says of PC gaming's long tail.
Rank 21+ games on PC trend heavily toward RPGs and action RPGs like these, but PC gamers also love some survival and open-world games, as well as "adventure" games, as Newzoo groups them. Long-tail volume is thus attributed to hits like Rust, DayZ, Dead by Daylight, Red Dead Redemption 2, and REPO (a notable new addition from 2025). It's not lost on me that many of these games are Steam sale staples, regularly putting up big discounts and bundles.
"On PC, the space below the Top 20 is becoming more economically meaningful," Gu says. "That doesn't make the market unconcentrated, but it does make games below the very top more commercially relevant than before."
The space below the top 20 also presents a near-total flip in business models: free-to-play games unsurprisingly dominate the upper echelons, but premium back-catalogue games own ranks 21+ on PC.
A full 78% of PC games ranked 21+ are premium releases, and of those 58% are back-catalogue titles like the above examples. Meanwhile, the top 20 are 74% free-to-play, all of them established games, as "no new free-to-play games made it to the top 20" on PC in 2025.
PlayStation and Xbox likewise "over-index" on RPG and adventure games in the long tail, with action RPGs leading the RPG space, but their tails are shorter overall. In 2025, PlayStation saw 38% of revenue come from games outside the top 20, Newzoo reports, while Xbox saw 35%. In 2024, that revenue was 35% and 33% respectively.
On PlayStation, "the shape of that long tail reflects the platform's premium identity more directly," with first-party hits like Ghost of Yotei, God of War Ragnarok, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, and The Last of Us Part 2 standing out.
Xbox, meanwhile, is heavily shaped by Game Pass. "It lowers the barrier to trial, helps more titles accumulate playtime, and likely explains why Xbox's long tail contains a somewhat larger share of newer titles than what we see on the other platforms," Gu writes. Game Pass also factors into the gap between playtime and spending: "Engagement broadens more than spending does, suggesting a more subscription-led form of redistribution."
Nintendo and the Switch family aren't included in the report, but Nintendo is even more first-party-focused than PlayStation, so I wouldn't expect a large difference between PS4 and PS5 in terms of long-tail patterns, though the numbers and games would obviously vary.
In summary, Newzoo finds that games ranked 21+ are "increasingly important" even as the top 20 continue to dominate, and PC demonstrates the greatest growth in this space. "There is still no easy path to scale below the Top 20," it concludes. "But there is a clearer path to relevance, and on some platforms, increasingly to revenue as well."
This is especially relevant at a time when "the rules that shaped the industry over the past two decades are being rewritten," as market intelligence director Emmanuel Rosier says in the 2026 report, sizing up the trajectory of games and players. "The PC and console market is not in decline, but it is no longer the growth engine it once was," he adds.
Even in this more mature market, PC gaming has seen "steady player expansion underpinning sustained revenue growth," Newzoo reports, which not-coincidentally lines up with increased investment in PC from many game developers, especially in the East, in recent years.
