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Newzoo has released its latest report on the games industry, this time focusing on PC and console MAU (Monthly Active Users) and Revenue Rankings. Some results come as a bit of a surprise, with multiplayer games outperforming most single-player games across the board. One of the most prominent games to be released this year was EA Sports College Football 25.
While sports games tend to get overlooked in the mix of other releases, EA Sports College Football 25 immediately jumped to #1. Specifically, it was #1 on both PlayStation and Xbox when the game was released in July and became the best-selling sports game in July.
Surprisingly, realistic sports games were the ones that dominated some of the top slots in gaming revenue across the board, regardless of platform. We’ve already established that EA Sports Football 25 jumped to #1, but EA Sports FC 24 came in at #3, and NBA 2K24 came in at #9, dropping three positions since the month prior.
Despite receiving mixed reviews, The First Descendant also did surprisingly well in July. It was #5 overall and on Xbox, #6 on PC, and #7 on PlayStation, respectively. It received a whopping 10 million player count across the board in the first week of its release, which is pretty significant for a free-to-play game.
Although miHoYo typically has taken the gacha world by storm, Zenless Zone Zero didn’t mainly hold up on other consoles than the PlayStation. The game was released on PlayStation 5, Android, iOS, and PC but only managed to enter the PlayStation rankings at #11.
Once looking at the report in detail, it makes a lot of sense that multiplayer games have gone on to outperform singleplayer games, especially since this year hasn’t particularly seen a huge influx of AAA games, with most of the potential big-hitters being slated to release much later in Q4 of 2024. It’s possible that when games such as Silent Hill 2, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom are all released respectively, the charts will shift in favor of single-player games, with them bringing in more revenue and active players.
One of the most surprising results is that the single Nintendo Switch game will make it into the top 20 revenue ranking overall. That game is Nintendo World Champions: NES Edition. While it immediately jumped up the charts and made it to #1 on Nintendo Switch, it didn’t experience such luck in the general charts. Instead, it sat at #17 as the only Nintendo-developed title out of the hard hitters.
