By most accounts, 2025 was an all-time year for video games, and could potentially contend for best gaming year ever. Between Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Silksong, Blue Prince and Donkey Kong Bananza, there was banger after banger being released across the year’s 12 months.
So surely that translated into the year-end sales charts, right? Well, mostly, except in one massive area.
More Than Half Of 2025’s Live Service Games Have Lost Over 90 Percent Of Their Players
15 of the 19 games we looked at lost between 80-99 percent of their players last year.
These Gamers Said: If It Doesn’t Have A Ball Or Gun, Then I’m Not Playing It
As shared by Genki on social media, in North America, eight of the top 10 best-selling games on PlayStation 5, at least digitally, involved guns or sports.
The list, which is topped by NBA 2K26, features almost every annualized title of the year (College Football 26, Madden 26 and MLB The Show 25), plus Battlefield 6, Grand Theft Auto 5, Arc Raiders and Black Ops 7. On that list, Ghost of Yotei is the only single-player, non-live service title, with Minecraft rounding out the list as a multiplayer title, albeit without any guns or balls.
Things don’t get much better when accounting for both digital and physical sales in the U.S. specifically, as first shared by Circana’s Mat Piscatella.
That list swaps GTA 5, Minecraft and Arc Raiders for another Call of Duty title (Black Ops 6), EA Sports FC 26 and Forza Horizon 5. In other words, it’s the same results: 80 percent of the bestsellers all had guns or sports in them.
It’s long been a meme among gamers that the vast majority of players would sooner play the next Madden title before something like Hollow Knight Silksong. It’s also not just a PlayStation thing, either, as nine of the top 12 best-selling games on Steam were multiplayer titles, including “friend slop” games. What’s more, only two games in Steam’s most-played list for 2025 were actually released in 2025.
Ultimately, people like what they like, and there’s nothing wrong with it. That Ghost of Yotei was able to break through that ceiling is pretty remarkable.
- Released
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September 5, 2025
- ESRB
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Everyone / In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
- Developer(s)
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Visual Concepts
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5
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