Y’all can afford games?
😳
I bought like 4 games last week for under $20.
AAA Gaming needs to get with the socioeconomic times.
Same thing happened with music.
It doesn’t mean AAA will go away, just like big stadium packing artists like Taylor Swift never went away. They just accounted for less of the industry’s total profits than they used to.
More of people’s disposable money is spent on a wider variety of music and games, often opting for more “indie” and cheaper versions of both. It’s a good thing, honestly, for people’s tastes to be more diversified and unique.
Except almost no one can live with music now, with the spotify model.
Good! Fuck that generic sludge being pushed out by shit companies ran by sociopaths.
Rank Title Release Year Country of Origin Free-to-Play 1 Roblox 2006 US Yes 2 Counter-Strike 2 2023 US Yes 3 League of Legends 2009 US Yes 4 Minecraft 2011 Sweden In China 5 Fortnite 2017 US For modes other than Save the World 6 Dota 2 2013 US Yes 7 Valorant 2020 US Yes 8 World of Warcraft 2004 US No 9 The Sims 4 2014 US No 10 Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 2025 US No 11 Escape from Tarkov 2025 Russia No 12 Overwatch 2 2023 US Yes 13 Marvel Rivals 2024 China Yes 14 PUBG: Battlegrounds 2017 South Korea Yes 15 World of Warcraft Classic 2019 US No 16 Grand Theft Auto V 2013 UK No 17 Diablo IV 2023 US No 18 Wuthering Waves 2024 China Yes 19 Genshin Impact 2020 China Yes 20 Apex Legends 2019 US Yes I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.
EDIT: Added release year after @[email protected] mentioned age.
EDIT2: And country of origin, while I’m at it.
EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe “availability” would be more interesting than “release”. World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.
I appreciate the nicely formatted table. :)
Nearly every title on that list is also a live service game that has been released for years. It’s almost like supporting your product post-launch builds a dedicated userbase or something.
(And yeah, I know it’s actually because of the profitability of addictive design patterns combined with microtransactions. Let me dream, please.)
This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.
True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLC during Early Access, then later revealed it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.
Doesn’t help that Icarus is such a technical mess. Certainly limits the player base when you shoot for a graphically demanding game and then don’t bother with working on performance.
Maybe I’m just grumpy that I can’t play it anymore since switching to Linux despite upgrading my gpu.
I should totally put release date on there too. Just a sec, will add on a column with that.
Wow, most of them were even older than I’d thought. And even some of the new ones like Tarkov were in Early Access for years before their official release date.
(You flipped the date and country for 16 and 17, btw)Already fixed, never mind!Yeah, but thanks for the heads-up!
One minor correction, I believe The Sims 4 went F2P at some point. They’re funded entirely by expansion packs now.
Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.
EDIT: A similar game might be DCS. I mean, yes, technically the base game is free, and you get (checks) a WW2 fighter and a Soviet ground-attack jet. But…basically that acts as a demo, and everyone is going to go out and get at least their favorite aircraft, and most of those aircraft cost about as much as a full-priced video game does. Hell, a couple of them are $80 each.
That’s fair. Though, by that logic would you consider something like that one Final Fantasy MMO F2P or not? I believe it lets you play all the old content for free and only charges for the last (few?) expansions.
Shouldn’t the sims 4 be considered free to play? The base game is free, only the dlc is paid.
Or effectively F2P/MTX based ones, even if they have an upfront cost.
And it’s not even counting mobile.
I hear a lot about the resurgance of honest, pay-upfront games, but revenue sure isn’t supporting that.
F2P games are subsidized by a small minority who will throw a hundred dollars a month into the game to obtain and max out whatever FOMO event or item/character is on rotation, and by an even smaller group of obscenely wealthy (or mentally ill) players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to say they own everything.
I’d honestly be fine with this model if the ones funding it were treated like patrons of the arts or something, but instead the industry hired a bunch of psychologists to run incredibly unethical experiments to create literally addictive design patterns encouraging the weak-willed or mentally ill to spend more.
Modern F2P game design is predatory and downright evil in the way it’s carefully cultivated to be just fun enough to continue playing, while constantly dangling the promise of more enjoyment if you’d only spend a tiny bit more (with that ‘bit more’ often only granting a small chance at getting what you want, with ‘pity’ systems only guaranteeing the desired drop if you spend the equivalent of around a hundred bucks in premium currency). But since it’s obscenely profitable, I don’t foresee it going away without legislation banning those practices.
It depends, it’s certainly inaccurate to describe all F2P games as doing this. Runescape, at least back in the 2000s, was F2P or a monthly sub. That was it.
And Roblox does it by exploiting kids.
Roblox screws over both the players and the creators who attract and keep them there, both of which as you said are mostly children. It’s actually kind of impressive how scummy the devs are. They’re the poster child for rent-seeking parasites.
Regardless of whatever fraction most of the revenue comes from, they still draw absolutely massive amounts of players.
I feel like this doesn’t account for people who play older games. Like I’m currently playing the God of War reboot. That would count as playing something that’s outside the current top 20, but still very-much AAA.
This is revenue. How many people are buying those games now? Older games are also usually heavily discounted so that’s even less money. And if the game was bought second hand then it’s entirely irrelevant.
Hey, so am I! I was never a big fan of the hack and slash of the original trilogy, but have been loving the axe combat and the Norse mythos.
I have been playing it on Steam Deck and am quite impressed with it.
PC players are always going to lead the trend because we have the most options. Microsoft and Sony are in a race to enshitify their ecosystems, while Nintendo is actively hostile towards it’s customers and fans.
Meanwhile I’m playing through what was originally a Playstation exclusive title that I got on sale on Steam, and run on Linux.
Spider-Man is a fun game
EA: hold my A key.
Because “top 20” are live service games that have been going on for years…
The top, however, remains deeply entrenched. The Top 5 PC games have been unchanged since 2023. In 2025, only Marvel Rivals and Wuthering Waves were among the rare new entrants to break into the Top 20.
If someone buys a hyped up single player game from on of the biggest studios of all time…
Itll most likely still be “outside the top 20” even tho it’s AAA
This trilogy was really confusing.
Weird how they changed to a new genre every release.
What about the AAAA games, like those that Ubislop put out?
This article seems to be lumping mobile and PC into the same bucket which is probably more of a red flag for the analysis they are doing here. Of course revenue is going to be more split when you add in tons of mobile games that are very effective at taking lots of money with minimal interaction.
All the games I see are PC/console. A few happen to be on mobile too, but that shouldn’t exclude them from the list.
TBH mobile revenue probably dwarfs these games, and must have a very different looking chart.
