A crowd promises reach, not revenue

The shares in the chart come to 26% + 18% + 84% = 128%, so this is not a market share chart, it is a reach chart. The same person is counted in three rows at once. The problem is that a revenue question is being answered with a reach chart. Newzoo’s own player total is 3.7 billion, the platforms add up to 4.7 billion. Those 1 billion double counted people are the ones already spending money on the PC and console side.

The revenue side of the same report already breaks that ranking. Newzoo’s revenue figures are consumer spend, so both come off the same measure and ad money is not inside either of them. Mobile is 121 billion, PC and console together are 93 billion. At first glance mobile looks like it earns 30% more, but it does that with twice the players. Per person it comes out at 40 dollars for mobile and 57 dollars for PC and console.

On top of that, those 40 dollars are gross. In mobile most of the money goes back out as UA and this is not an exception, it is the model itself. Royal Match did 1.52 billion dollars gross in 2023, 1.06 billion was left net after the platform cut, and the same year it spent 1.07 billion on UA. So one of the best businesses in the industry handed more than the whole of its net revenue to user acquisition and booked a 134 million dollar operating loss.

The small version of the same arithmetic is this. In mobile, for 1 million dollars of profit at 120% ROAS you have to do 6 million in revenue and give 5 million of it to UA. On the premium side 1.9 million gross is enough for the same profit and there is barely a line item called UA.

So 40 against 57 is already a calculation set up in mobile’s favour. Once you take UA off both sides the gap does not close, it opens wide.

On top of that, in mobile the biggest 1% of publishers takes 92.5% of all IAP revenue, which is 460 of the 46 thousand publishers that make any revenue. That ratio is coming down, it fell from 95%. On Steam the top 10’s share fell from 41% to 28%. Both are concentrated, but one of them is standing still, and in mobile the thing holding that place is not the game, it is the UA budget. So those gross 40 dollars are not spread evenly either, while in the chart 3.10 billion people sit there as one big block.

Look at the number of competitors per person too. 20,853 games came out on Steam in 2025 and there are 977 million players on the PC side, so there is one new game for every 47 thousand players. On the mobile side Vietnam alone shipped 27,388 games in 2025, so a single country produces more than all of Steam. You can work out the number of games sharing that 3.10 billion yourself.

None of this makes mobile bad. Mobile is still the biggest games market in the world and plenty of people win there. What it does say is more this, player count measures a market’s crowd, not its size. A crowd promises you reach, it does not promise revenue, and you can count the games that speak to the whole of that market on two hands.

With the same report you can prove that mobile is both the biggest and the weakest platform. There is not much point in being sensationalist to make one platform look better than another.