Why 2026 could set a new high score for the video game industry
Gaming’s not just for kids anymore. The majority of Baby Boomers play video games every week, too, and Candy Crushing grandparents also contribute to the $60 billion-plus industry.
We’re on track to spend more on video games this year in the United States than ever before.
2025 was the video game industry’s second-biggest year on record, according to data from the Entertainment Software Association, Circana and Sensor Tower. We only spent more on games when we were locked down with nothing to do but play Animal Crossing in 2020.
And 2026 could be even bigger.
It used to be a real boom-or-bust industry. Like Hollywood, but instead of everyone rushing to go see “Wicked,” everyone would rush to buy the newest PlayStation or Nintendo gaming system, and wait for months or years for the next installment of “Zelda” or “Star Wars” or “Madden.”
Those booms still happen. There was a boom when the Nintendo Switch came out last June.
But there aren’t as many busts anymore.
“Pretty much everybody who wants to play can now, because of the proliferation of smartphones all over the world and the drop in costs for bandwidth and access,” said Dmitri Williams, communications professor at the University of Southern California.
And most people do want to play. One in three people over 80 years old and the majority of Baby Boomers play video games every week.
“This is not one demographic. Young kids don’t spend enough to spend $60.7 billion by themselves,” said Aubrey Quinn with the Entertainment Software Association, a trade group. “I feel like every time I sit on a plane next to a woman 50 or older, she’s got her iPad out or her phone out, and she is doing some sort of puzzle-matching-something game.”
The 8-year-old Roblox warriors and the 80-year-old Candy Crush-ers are primarily spending on free-to-play games. These are the ones where you can grind for hours without paying a cent, but you get interrupted every five minutes with an ad, and if you just spent $4.99 per month you could get rid of the ads and unlock this special currency that would make building your virtual garden go way faster. If you’ve ever done that, you added to the $60.7 billion gaming industry.
The other growing model is gaming subscriptions. Just like you pay for Spotify and Netflix, you might buy a season pass that unlocks cool costumes and catchphrases for your character.
Even as these other revenue sources have grown, 2025 also got a good old fashioned boost from the new Nintendo console.
And this year is set to get a boost too.
“‘Grand Theft Auto VI’, that’s something that we’ve been waiting for over a decade,” said Sam Aune with the digital analytics group Sensor Tower. “Everyone thinks that ‘GTA VI’ is going to be one of the hugest moments in maybe gaming history when it comes out later this year. Fingers crossed.”
“Grand Theft Auto” has a little bit of everything that makes games profitable. You’ll pay a lot of money for it, you can play online and pay money for cool bells and whistles, there’ll be clips on social media from content creators which act as free advertising, and it’ll generate the same everybody’s-doing-it fervor as dressing in pink and going to see the Barbie movie.
“The one big tent pole sometimes is something that people are rallying around the way that you’d say, ‘Well, nobody watches the same thing anymore, except for the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl. Sometimes that’s the equivalent in games,’” Williams said.
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