The latest figures out of Germany provide evidence of a troubling decline in the popularity of PC gaming since 2019. A yearly chart showing the video gaming trends observed in the European industrial powerhouse suggests that PC gaming has slumped by 20% since 2019. Over the same period, we see from the Game.de report (machine translation, and using data from YouGov) that the popularity of mobile and tablet gaming has stayed pretty steady, with console gaming the only reliable market share gainer, year after year.
Game.de isn’t a PC-centric source; it is actually a site representing the association of the German games industry, and it leads its report by heralding the momentum behind games consoles. If these dedicated video gaming devices continue on their current path/trend, they will become the top platform for gaming in Germany in the not-too-distant future.
Consoles have momentum
In the above chart, you can see the momentum behind consoles looks clear. If we ignore the 2023 tally for consoles, the impressive uplift seen in 2024 would make a straight ramp upwards with a steep incline of 13 degrees – that’s some hard peddling.
As for reasons why consoles are doing so well, Game.de reckons this platform has grown 29% since 2019 due to continued innovations and pressure from major players like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. It reminds us that optimized versions of the major consoles have been rolled out to take the sting out of this market’s cyclical nature. Here, it is referring to things like the PlayStation 5 Pro or the Nintendo Switch OLED model. Now Nintendo has, of course, released the Switch 2, which we wouldn’t want to bet against being a strong seller with impacts on the overall industry 2025 numbers.
The latest figures show console users in Germany (20.5m) rapidly gaining on smartphone gamers (22.9m). On the topic of smartphones, they enjoyed a significant gaming-based uplift from 2019 to 2020, but the curve seems to have become a flat horizontal line now.
PCs falling back
As per our headline, PC gaming has declined 20% since 2019, according to the YouGov figures for Germany. While there were still 13.1 million active PC gamers in Germany at the end of 2024, which sounds considerable, that is 400,000 fewer than a year previously, continuing a general downtrend over the charted time period.
The chart also shows a serious reversal of fortunes, as in 2019, PC gamers outnumbered console gamers by 16.3 to 15.9 million. Now the gap is over 7 million in favor of consoles. We are reminded that the data folds in the fact that many gamers don’t just use a single platform. Around 19 million gamers in Germany will play on two or more platforms.
As to why the PC gaming numbers might be so unsatisfactory for proponents of the platform, we don’t get a lot from the Game.de report. Overall, the site comments on the industry taking “a break from growth in 2024.” Game sales were said to be down 17% in 2024, with hardware sales down 10%. Online gaming services were the only bright spot with growth at 12%.
If we had to put forward possible reasons behind the decline of PC gaming in Germany, and in general, it would be due to the well-reported shortages of exciting new components, and some of those components (like GPUs) offering few new thrills for budget, entry, to mid-range gamers.
We couldn’t find the same types of charts for the U.S. or worldwide gaming markets. Game.de presumably gets special access to YouGov reports due to it being an industry association.
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