CMGC
2.7K posts
CMGC
@ChrisOnMobile
Co-Founder & President of @MGCmobile. Previously Nintendo and Power Accessories lead @PDPgaming. Built from the grind up.
Take my money!
Just read @ballmatthew new The State of Video Gaming in 2026 report. Top ten takeaways for me: 1. Game industry revenue hit $195.6 billion in 2025. That's a new all-time high. Operating profits have declined since 2019. 2. Almost all of the growth went to three parties: Chinese publishers, platform holders like Apple, Google, and Sony, and Roblox. Everyone else is fighting over a market that barely moved. 3. There isn't one video gaming industry. There are many. A Western AAA studio, a Roblox developer, and a Chinese mobile publisher are in completely different businesses, with different growth rates and different competitors. 4. Roblox had 150 million daily users in Q3 2025. Its quarterly engagement is now equal to Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined. It monetizes at $0.05 per hour. PlayStation monetizes at $0.44. Roblox is winning on volume. 5. Mobile game advertising generated $67 billion in gross revenue in 2025. Most industry analysis doesn't count it. Including ads, the non-China market grew $35 billion since 2021. Excluding ads, it grew $6.8 billion. The two numbers describe completely different industries. 6. US gamer participation is down 2.5 to 4 percentage points since the pandemic. Most of the eight major Western markets are flat or declining in players and spend. 7. The Rest of World is growing at 11.7% annually. The Mature Market 8 is growing at 1.4%. Capturing that gap requires designing for low-end devices, building economics around $5 to $50 per year per player, and making games for local cultures, not Western ones. 8. Of $136 billion in non-China content sales, platform stores took $33.7 billion in fees. That's iOS, Android, console, and Steam combined. D2C channels bypass most of those fees. Roblox has saved $422 million in platform fees since Q1 2022 by routing spend through its own channels. 9. Online sports betting hit $17 billion in US gross revenue in 2025. That's 35x what it was in 2019. iGaming globally generated $54 billion. TikTok averages 102 million daily hours in the US alone. These aren't passive entertainment alternatives. They're interactive, real-time, and built for engagement in ways most games aren't. 10. In 2025, 35.5% of all game content investment was outsourced. That's a record. And 74% of that growth is upstream: art, engineering, game design, not QA or localization. Hollow Knight: Silksong has 3 internal credits and 94 external ones. That's the new normal. Early access version: matthewball.co/all/presentati…
