Battle Royale Playtime Fell Hard in 2025 Even as the Same Live Service Giants Kept Dominating the Industry
Newzoo’s latest market analysis paints a very revealing picture of where gaming time is really going. On one hand, the biggest live service franchises still dominate player attention across PC and console. On the other, one of the genres most associated with that dominance, battle royale, suffered one of the sharpest year over year drops in engagement. According to Newzoo’s PC and Console Gaming Report 2026, battle royale playtime fell 27% in 2025 compared with 2024, while sandbox games surged, led largely by Roblox. The broader report also says PC gaming is set to outpace console growth through 2028, pushing the combined PC and console games market toward 103.7 billion dollars.
That contrast is what makes the data so interesting. The top franchises in 2025 were still the names everyone would expect, including Roblox, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Minecraft, EA Sports FC, Counter Strike 2, League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto V, NBA 2K, Marvel, World of Warcraft, Valorant, Dota 2, Rainbow Six, Battlefield, Apex Legends, Rocket League, Overwatch, The Sims 4, and Monster Hunter. These franchises continue to absorb a huge share of playtime across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, reinforcing just how concentrated the market remains around legacy live service ecosystems.
Yet the genre trend underneath that concentration is shifting. Newzoo’s data indicates that battle royale was down 27%, while shooters also slipped by 5% in playtime during 2025. By contrast, sandbox games rose by roughly 35%, with Roblox acting as the biggest growth engine in that category. That suggests the top level leaderboard can stay familiar even while player behavior inside the market starts changing in meaningful ways. The giants are still giant, but the mix of genres driving attention is no longer as stable as it looked a few years ago.
Roblox is a huge part of that story. Newzoo’s reported rankings place it as the most played franchise of 2025, ahead of Fortnite and Call of Duty, and outside reporting on the same dataset says Roblox posted a 52% increase in playtime. That matters because Roblox is not just another hit game. It behaves more like a platform, a social space, and a creator ecosystem at once. Its continued rise makes the sandbox surge look less like a small genre bump and more like a structural change in where younger players are choosing to spend their time.
The broader market outlook also reinforces why this matters. Newzoo says PC revenue is projected to grow at a 6.6% CAGR from 2025 to 2028, compared with 4.4% for console, with PC expected to overtake console revenue by the end of 2028. At the same time, console players still spend more per player on average, supported by first party releases and higher subscription pricing. So while console remains strong on monetization, PC is where Newzoo sees more of the long term expansion coming from.
There is another important layer in the report as well. Even with the top 20 franchises still consuming a huge amount of total playtime, the market below them appears to be opening slightly more on PC. Coverage of the Newzoo report notes that games outside the top 20 accounted for a growing share of PC playtime, rising from 33% in 2023 to 42% in 2025. That suggests the market is still heavily concentrated, but not completely locked down. Players are spending more time beyond the mega hits, especially on PC, even as the largest live service brands continue to dominate the overall conversation.
The real long term question is what happens next with younger audiences. If today’s youth are growing up inside Roblox style sandbox ecosystems, they may not naturally graduate into battle royale in the same way the industry once assumed. They may instead expect more open ended creation, persistence, and social flexibility than traditional last player standing formats usually offer. That is an inference from Newzoo’s reported genre and franchise trends, but it is exactly the kind of shift publishers should be watching closely.
So no, this is not the death of battle royale. Fortnite remains one of the biggest franchises in the world, and the top 20 list is still packed with live service heavyweights. But Newzoo’s data does suggest that battle royale is no longer the same automatic growth engine it once was, while sandbox games, especially Roblox, are capturing more of the momentum that used to belong elsewhere.
What do you think, will younger players eventually move from sandbox platforms like Roblox into battle royale and shooters, or is the industry heading toward a very different kind of dominant genre mix?
