Private funding in the global gaming industry plummeted a massive 55 percent last year, according to Epyllion’s latest State of the Video Gaming report.
While Global game contents sales rose 5.3 percent, and there was a new revenue high, the outlook for the traditional gaming industry is far from rosy with 9200 people losing their jobs in the industry last year.
Epyllion says the 40 content deals in the last three months of 2025 attracted less than US$100 million of pre-seed investments and more than $US200 million, in early-stage funding.
Global consumer spending on games: Epyllion
Games Industry.biz, which published details of the report, says more than half of the recent redundancies were in California from 2022 and 2025, with the rest spread around the APAC region, China, the Middle East and Africa.
One major development is a move by platforms to outsource more development. Flexible skills are cited as a major reason.
However, there is a major shift in consumer sentiment with young users migrating to Roblox in droves.
“By the end of 2024, Roblox had more daily active users than PlayStation, Switch or Xbox. In 2025, this was up another 69 percent”, Games Industry.biz says.
“The platform has also reached over 10 billion monthly engagement hours, more than Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined.”
It seems young users are finding the engagement offered by Roblox and its massive arsenal of user developed games far more exciting than traditional console gaming. Roblox users also can hone their games development skills.
Still, console gaming can rake in huge sums, with consumer spending reaching $US41.6bn, up from $US41.1bn in 2020. PlayStation Plus, Xbox Game Pass, and Nintendo Switch Online were the dominant recipients of net spending growth.
Another factor is China’s dominance which has attracted more than half the global growth in player spending since 2019, Games Industry.biz says.