adminFree-to-play playtime has remained broadly steady in absolute hours, even as its share of PC and console gaming declined between 2021 and 2025. A Newzoo analysis points to a changing market: growth in premium games and Roblox affected F2P’s share, while gacha RPGs became a major driver of PC engagement.
Image credit: Hoyoverse, Hotta Studio. Left to right: Zenless Zone Zero, Neverness To Everness, Genshin Impact, Tower of Fantasy, Honkai Star Rail.
Free-to-play playtime remains broadly flat
Newzoo’s special focus report challenges the idea that free-to-play is dying. Its Game Performance Monitor covers PC and console engagement across 37 markets, excluding China, India, and mobile.
From 2021 to 2025, F2P’s share of total playtime fell by 2.9 percentage points to 29.3%. However, the number of hours players spent in free-to-play games remained broadly flat. Newzoo attributes the lower share largely to expansion elsewhere in the market, including premium games and Roblox.
The platform-level picture differs. PC F2P playtime increased, although its share of PC playtime declined. On console, F2P hours fell, with much of the decrease concentrated in a small number of established live-service games. When comparing platforms, it is useful to distinguish a game category’s share from its total hours: one can fall while the other stays stable or grows.
Fewer new live-service games are launching
Annual F2P live-service launches on PC and console peaked at 36 titles in 2017. The average number of launches dropped 31%, from 21.3 titles per year in 2020–2022 to 14.7 in 2023–2025, even as releases across the wider games market increased.
Newzoo points to rising costs, higher risks, and competition from established titles as barriers for new free-to-play live-service games. For players, this can mean fewer new launches in the category; for developers, it highlights the challenge of attracting an audience in a market with entrenched competitors.
Gacha RPGs lead PC F2P growth
Gacha, which Newzoo defines as progression-based loot box monetization, has become a key area of PC free-to-play growth. The report counts 17 major gacha titles on PC and console in 2025, compared with three in 2021.
Between 2021 and 2025, PC gacha playtime grew 92%, adding 864 million hours. Console gacha games added 85 million hours over the same period, despite recording declines in two of those years. These figures describe engagement, not necessarily revenue, so they should not be treated as a direct measure of commercial performance.
RPG was the only F2P genre to gain share on both platforms. On PC, RPGs’ share of F2P playtime increased by 5.3 percentage points to 14.3%. Wuthering Waves, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero contributed a combined 1.1 billion hours by 2025. On console, RPG share rose from 10.0% to 10.3%. Zenless Zone Zero, Wuthering Waves, and Honkai: Star Rail gained ground after launching on the platform, while Genshin Impact declined.
Engagement and revenue are not moving in lockstep
Newzoo says audience overlap indicates that some PC gacha growth comes from players moving between games in the category. It also notes that rising engagement has not produced a proportionate increase in revenue, describing a widening gap between engagement and monetization.
Revenue has also become less concentrated among the five biggest F2P titles. Across the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, their combined console revenue share fell from 79% in 2021 to 72% in 2025. On PC, it decreased from 68% to 65%.
What the figures mean for free-to-play gaming
The data suggests that free-to-play is changing rather than disappearing. Total playtime can remain steady even as the category loses market share, and strong PC engagement in gacha RPGs does not automatically translate into matching revenue growth. When interpreting these trends, consider the platform, time period, market coverage, and whether a figure measures playtime, share, or revenue. Overall, free-to-play playtime remains substantial, with gacha RPGs providing a notable source of PC growth.
Separately, several new releases entered Newzoo’s Top 20 revenue charts in August: EA Sports Madden NFL 27 debuted at No. 2 on console, while House House’s co-op title Big Walk ranked No. 3 on PC.
