Twenty years after the start of its explosive growth, especially speeding up in the 2010s and getting a big push from COVID-19 in 2020, the gaming industry is set to reach a huge new milestone. According to data presented by Betideas.com, the gaming industry revenue is expected to grow by a solid 10% and hit over half a trillion dollars in 2025.
A Massive New Milestone with a Projected 45% Growth Ahead
The half-a-trillion-dollar valuation is a major milestone for the gaming industry, coming just three years after one of its most challenging periods. After record revenue and user growth throughout 2020 and 2021, 2022 brought the first-ever revenue and user drop, raising concerns about whether the gaming momentum might be fading. Three years forward, the market shows that gaming hype is not even close to slowing down, with the sector generating more revenue than ever and demonstrating impressive resilience to global economic headwinds.
According to Statista Market Forecast, the gaming industry is projected to generate $522 billion in revenue in 2025, $47 billion more than last year. This marks a solid 10% year-over-year growth, mirroring the industry’s strong performance in 2023 and 2024. Most of that growth will come from cloud gaming (51%), in-game advertising (13%), and live streaming (12%), the market’s three fastest-growing segments. In contrast, some of the industry’s largest segments by revenue share, like mobile games and gaming hardware, are expected to grow at a much slower pace, with annual increases of around 6% and 10%, respectively.
And while half a trillion dollars in revenue is a significant achievement for the gaming sector, that figure will continue rising in the following years. Statista expects the gaming industry revenue to grow by another 45% and hit over $730 billion by the end of the decade. To put that into perspective, that’s just 9% below the projected value of the artificial intelligence market in 2030, ten times larger than the expected size of the robotics sector, and close to the current value of the global public cloud industry.
Half-a-Trillion Dollar Industry with More than Two Billion Users
For years, video games have been the fastest-growing and highest-grossing segment of the media industry, and that trend is set to continue as more people than ever turn to gaming.
Since 2017, the number of gamers has nearly doubled, rising from 990 million to over 1.8 billion last year. Statista expects this number to increase by another 100 million and hit 1.98 billion in 2025 and then jump to over two billion in 2026. Although user growth will slow to an average of 50 million new gamers per year, the industry is still on track to hit an impressive 2.23 billion users by the decade’s end.
Every fourth user will come from China, which is projected to count nearly 600 million gamers by 2030. The world’s largest gaming market by revenue, the United States, is forecast to reach just 215 million gamers by then, or less than half of China’s total.