We’ve known that in recent years older games have been monopolizing more and more of players’ time, especially on PC, but it turns out that’s also been translating to players spending more and more of their money on stuff that’s not actual games. Namely things like battle passes and Call of Duty skins. In fact, microtransactions make up over half of all spending on PC gaming, according to a new report by Newzoo.
The market research firm’s 2025 report on console and PC gaming paints a picture of a landscape increasingly dominated by everything but the dozens of new games coming out each week. Newzoo’s data suggests PC gamers only spent 8 percent of their collective gaming time in 2024 playing games that came out that year. Instead, their time was spent on older games, with over 60 percent of it going to things that had released over six years prior.
Does that mean those players aren’t spending money? Nope. It just means they’re spending the majority of it on in-game microtransactions, whether that’s user-generated content in Roblox, new Adventure Time skins in Fortnite, or, uh, Venom twerking in Marvel Rivals. It doesn’t help that cosmetics and skins keep getting more expensive. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's new Jay and Silent Bob tracer bundle is $20. According to Newzoo, only 28 percent of PC gaming spending in 2024 went to full games.
The research firm’s breakdown puts microtransactions at 58 percent of spending with DLC, like Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree, at 14 percent. Combined, that left only $10.7 billion for full game purchases, down 2.6 percent from the year prior. Those numbers might shift in 2026 with some bigger releases like Elden Ring Nightreign, Borderlands 4, and more on the horizon, but the trend is pretty clear. And if the next GTA Online is anywhere near as big as the current one, that will only sap more money out of the ecosystem through microtransactions.
Of course, whether microtransactions are truly leeching from the system is up for debate. With video game prices (mostly) stagnant even as budgets explode and unit sales figures remain mostly flat, many publishers have opted to recoup more revenue from those in-game purchases. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is only $70, but includes a full suite of purchasable cosmetics and other add-ons. At the same time, games without that business model grafted onto them, especially indie releases, are seemingly left in an increasingly challenging position as a bigger piece of the pie is being absorbed by a smaller set of players.
The shift is slightly less dramatic on console, but still visible. Microtransactions only make up 32 percent of player spending there, according to Newzoo (that’s up 4.5 percent year-over-year). A plurality of all spending is still on full game purchases, though probably not for long. The growth of subscriptions like Xbox Game Pass, PS Plus Extra, and Switch Online Expansion Pack are all taking a roughly 16-percent chunk of the money (up 14 percent year-0ver-year). DLC, on the other hand, is just 5 percent of spending, or about $2.2 billion. Console players, it would seem, still have a stronger preference for moving on to the next new thing.
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