It has become the only platform where more than half of all revenue comes from games that sit outside the top 20.
According to Newzoo’s PC & Console Gaming Report 2026, the long tail, used here as a sales concept, is getting longer and longer, and nowhere is that trend more visible than on PC. In Western markets, the share of titles ranked below 20th place rose from 48% to 56% in 2025. In those markets, more than half of PC revenue now comes from games outside the top 20. Players are not only buying more games beyond the top 20, they are also spending more time with them: playtime for those titles grew by 44%, while total PC playtime rose by 14%, and the top 20’s playtime stayed more or less flat or dipped slightly.
The titles benefiting most from this sustained interest alongside the latest hits include Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but also a wide range of survival games and action RPGs, two genres where ongoing support, updates, and balance work tend to keep players engaged for much longer. Rust, DayZ, and Path of Exile 2 are among the games profiting most from that sustained attention.
On PlayStation, meanwhile, these older games are still competing directly with annual sports franchises, which continue to consume a great deal of playtime even among the most popular titles. When PlayStation users return to older games, they overwhelmingly gravitate toward prestige titles that originally launched as exclusives, such as God of War: Ragnarök, Ghost of Tsushima, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and The Last of Us Part II. Xbox, on the other hand, has cemented its position as the Game Pass machine, where playtime depends heavily on whether a game is currently available in the subscription service. New free-to-play titles on Xbox account for less than 1% of total playtime, presumably because players view them as distractions from the Game Pass library they have already paid for.
More than 20 years ago, when Chris Anderson popularized the long tail concept in Wired, PC gaming was one of the markets he argued was perfectly suited to benefit from it. He wrote that retro gaming, including classic console emulation on modern PCs, was becoming a growing phenomenon driven by nostalgia from the first joystick generation. But while Skyrim and DayZ are now old enough to count as retro, the more recent past is still generating more interest than before.
Newzoo points out that games such as Repo and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 continue to sell steadily even though they are no longer on bestseller charts. Where there used to be a steep drop once a game stopped being new and trendy, there is now a bigger audience waiting for sales, or simply waiting for enough free time to try the games that were popular roughly a year ago. As Gu Tianyi, Newzoo’s head of market analysis, put it, the space below the top 20 on PC is becoming economically more important.
That does not mean market concentration is decreasing, but it does mean games below the very top tier are becoming more commercially relevant than they used to be.
Source: PCGamer, Newzoo, Wired
