What to expect from PC gaming in 2025: more breakout hits and a GTA 6-shaped elephant in the room

Grab your tea leaves, telescope, and tarot cards. If your prophesying tool of choice hasn't been mentioned, bring that too. Trying to divine what to expect from PC gaming has always been a fickle art, but last year made that significantly more difficult – after all, 2024's biggest takeoffs were PlayStation's golden child Helldivers 2 and twisted poker roguelike Balatro.

But from what we can see, 2025 is looking to be a huge year for the platform. PC gaming is the most popular it's been in a long time, and the sheer sprawl of games launched on Steam make surprise hits that much harder to see coming. But that uncertainty extends to less-exciting prospects: a lot of PCs are going to be pushed to their technological limits, and there's still a huge question mark surrounding Grand Theft Auto 6's PC launch.

Child of surprise

PC gaming is a petri dish from which many strange and wonderful creatures evolve. Most (if not all) of the industry's modern trends can trace their roots to the platform. A little-known game called Stardew Valley – originally PC-only – kickstarted a slew of farm management life sims, and played a massive part in the cozy gaming genre taking off as it has. The first game to send battle royales into the mainstream, PUBG, came from a mod within a mod (DayZ: battle royale) – it doesn't get more on the nose than that.

Steam's fairly open market – along with indie-leaning storefront itch.io and even standalone browser-based games like Wordle – mean that if a game can cut through the noise, it can make it big without the traditional publishing structure that dominates consoles. We'll never be able to predict the PUBGs or Stardews before they happen (if you can – every game studio in the world would like to buy you dinner), but that surprise is a large part of what makes our platform so fun.

That being said, I do think we're going to continue seeing more small and mid-size publishers take more gambles on lower-profile developers. Just look at Hooded Horse, which is the most interesting publisher in the scene right now. It has an eye for helping excellent games reach their audience – indie city builder Manor Lords passed 2.5 million sales just months into its Early Access launch, while Against The Storm recorded a whopping 1.4 million sales (via GI.biz). They're still gambles (it feels like any game release is, nowadays) but I'd love to see more publishers follow suit and gamble on ideas before trends.

Over on the AAA front, PC gaming's inherent uncertainty is less of a positive. Though we're several years into the current console gen, it feels like many studios are only now starting to push their technological capabilities, which of course raises the boat for PC. I get the feeling my current 2060 Super GPU isn't going to have the same staying power as my beloved 1060 enjoyed, and with an increased reliance on AI upscaling, it wouldn't surprise me to see more AAA launches become more volatile performance-wise. It will be interesting to see how February's Monster Hunter Wilds releases on PC – while Capcom has traditionally struggled with PC optimization in the past, this has the defence of looking like a genuine step-up from a lot of visuals we've been seeing. Avowed and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 are also launching in that window, so many (myself included) will find that February answers whether it's finally time to upgrade hardware or not.

On the plus side, 2024 was one of the last nails in the coffin for hardcore console exclusivity. Xbox has essentially abandoned the concept in favor of joint Xbox-PC releases, and it doesn't feel like PlayStation is far behind. Helldivers 2's dual launch on PS5 and PC led to it being one of Sony's highest-earning games of all time, while this January sees both Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth escape their sleek console confines. Don't expect PlayStation to immediately cede its exclusives – Sony still feels significantly more invested in selling its consoles than Microsoft – but do expect shorter gaps between its console and PC launches, while multiplayer-heavy games like Helldivers 2 will be likelier to launch on both platforms at once.

But it's hard to discuss all of this without touching on GTA 6. Publishers are breaking their backs to avoid releasing within a mile of Rockstar's shadow, and in tandem with the Nintendo Switch 2 threatening a similarly vague release, companies across the board are very reluctant to show their hand too soon. GTA 6 hasn't even been announced for PC yet, which also begs the question: is Rockstar going to keep us waiting with staggered launches, as it did for Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto 5, or follow Xbox and PlayStation in putting more emphasis on the massive PC market? Right now, there's no way of knowing. GTA 6 is an entity unto itself, too big to be judged against any other release or trend, and we can only guess at the pros and cons Take-Two has weighed up for a simultaneous launch. I wouldn't like to put money on either option, but my gut instinct says that we'll get GTA 6 several months after our pals on console.

Regardless of whether we spend 2025 cruising through Leonida or obsessed with a cozy-deckbuilding-farming-roguelike-royale that one part-time developer blows our minds with, the next year of PC gaming looks exceptionally bright. Given the best PC games have been long-defined by breakout hits, we might not be able to guess every detail of what's in store – but wouldn't knowing just spoil the fun?

See where we've ranked the 50 most anticipated games of this year in Big in 2025