“F2P is not dying,” according to a Newzoo special focus report that challenges assumptions that free-to-play is in decline.
According to the new analysis – which uses Newzoo’s Game Performance Monitor, covering PC and console engagement across 37 markets, excluding China, India, and mobile – F2P’s share of playtime fell 2.9 percentage points between 2021 and 2025, to 29.3%, but absolute hours remained broadly flat.
Newzoo attributes the fall largely to growth elsewhere in the market, including premium games and Roblox.
On PC, F2P playtime grew even as its share declined, while on console, F2P playtime fell, with the decline concentrated in a handful of established live-service titles. F2P live-service launches on PC and console peaked at 36 titles in 2017, but the annual average fell 31%, from 21.3 titles in 2020-2022 to 14.7 in 2023-2025, even though releases rose across the wider market.
The report cites rising costs, greater risks, and established competitive titles as making it harder for new F2P live-service games to break through.
F2P revenue is also becoming less concentrated among the top five titles. Their combined share on console fell from 79% in 2021 to 72% in 2025, and on PC from 68% to 65%, across the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy.
Gacha, which Newzoo defines as progression-based loot box monetization, has become the main area of F2P growth on PC. The report counts 17 major gacha titles on PC and console in 2025, up from three in 2021. PC gacha playtime grew 92% between 2021 and 2025, adding 864 million hours, while console gacha added 85 million hours over the same period despite shrinking in two of those years.
RPG was the only F2P genre to gain share on both platforms. On PC, its share of F2P playtime rose 5.3 percentage points to 14.3%, with Wuthering Waves, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero adding a combined 1.1 billion hours by 2025. On console, RPG share edged up from 10.0% to 10.3%. Zenless Zone Zero, Wuthering Waves, and Honkai: Star Rail gained ground as they launched there, while Genshin Impact fell.
Newzoo says audience overlap suggests much of the PC gacha growth comes from players moving between titles in the category. It adds that the growth has not translated into proportionate revenue, pointing to “a widening gap between engagement and monetization.”
Several new releases entered Newzoo’s Top 20 revenue charts in August, with EA Sports Madden NFL 27 debuting at No. 2 on console and House House’s co-op title Big Walk ranking No. 3 on PC.