Every year, hundreds if not thousands of new games are flooding digital platforms. However, most of players’ time, especially on console, is spent on the top 20 titles. Sports games, shooters, Minecraft and the like. The games that dominate conversations and headlines. It’s tough out there if you want to break in and get an audience without being one of the top 20, but PC seems the best place to do it.
Newzoo’s PC & Console Gaming Report 2026 is out now (thanks, PC Gamer), and it shows that in Western markets, more than half of PC revenue now comes from games outside the top 20. It was also noted that playtime for those games on PC grew 44% while playtime in the top 20 flattened out.
When we talk about games outside of the top 20, we don’t necessarily mean niche indie titles, as instead it’s noted that PC is the place where games can have the longest tails. Constant sales and mods that bring old games up to modern standards let games like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Skyrim remain incredibly durable years after they first hit the market. Survival games and action RPGs also benefit a lot from continued interest, as they often get big content updates bringing in new players all the time.
For PlayStation and Xbox, it seems a bit trickier to convince a player to jump to a game outside of the top 20. If a PlayStation player does go back to an older game, it’s to play a classic first-party exclusive, the likes of God of War Ragnarök, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man 2, and The Last of Us Part 2. On Xbox, anything that isn’t on Game Pass rarely gets a lot of attention. New free-to-play titles are counting for less than 1% of playtime on Xbox.
Newzoo notes that on PC it’s much more likely to see games continue to dig up sales even when they’re out of the bestseller lists. No wonder we see games go on discount on Steam fairly soon after release, as it seems like one of the only places you can keep driving up sales long after you’ve first launched.
