IGN Entertainment has launched Gaming Trends, a data-driven insights platform that utilises the company’s vast reach to predict the future direction of gaming and entertainment.
With 500 million monthly visitors across 110 countries, IGN’s reach gives it an expansive temperature check of what’s trending. In its initial study, IGN’s leadership draws a few conclusions on what that data reveals – a summary of those key learnings is below.
Signing up to Gaming Trends is free. Watching the video, hosted by IGN’s SVP of publishing, John Davison, offers many more data points that informed the study than we’ve captured below, but here are a few highlights.
Mobile gaming is king
The prominence of mobile among younger players probably won’t be a huge surprise to anyone reading this – 93% of Gen Alpha prefer playing on mobile, according to IGN’s segmentation study. But preference for mobile is actually growing for Millennials, too, with 32% calling it their preferred device.
The study also makes the assertion that Fortnite has been a key factor in the Nintendo Switch’s recent success, especially as the game hadn’t been available on the App Store since August 2020 (that changed recently, of course, as a result of the Epic vs Apple fallout).
Davison says an estimated 81 million people have played Fortnite on Switch – a number that eclipses the sales of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe at 68 million copies sold.
It’s also why, despite the Switch 2’s massive launch success, mobile will remain a threat to Nintendo.
UGC growth
Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) has resulted in almost 200,000 games being made by creators within the Fortnite ecosystem. But this figure is dwarfed by the numbers in Roblox, which is home to around 40 million user-made experiences.
Daily concurrent user numbers have grown in Roblox from 3.8 million in June 2022 to more than 25 million in June 2025. Over the same period, Fortnite has grown from 1.2 million to 1.77 million concurrents – with occasional blips, like when 15.3 million players logged on for the Marvel Galactus event.
On Roblox, Grow a Garden has so far peaked at 21.3 million players, becoming the most popular game of all time by concurrent user count. For context, that’s more people than the top 100 Steam games combined.
Games powering pop culture
A Minecraft Movie has proved to be an enormous success, raking in $950 million at the box office at the same time as driving player interest in the game. Monthly active user figures for Minecraft across PlayStation and Xbox reached a new high of 20 million as a result.
Similarly, Five Nights at Freddy’s became Blumhouse’s highest grossing movie ever in 2023, passing $297 million at the box office. A sequel is due in December this year.
One key difference between earlier attempts at movies and TV shows based on popular video games and the ones being made now is that the people in charge are dedicated fans of the games they’re adapting, or are even the original creators – as seen with Amazon’s Fallout TV show and the upcoming Elden Ring film adaptation. Writer and director Alex Garland says he has played through Elden Ring seven times.
Games merchandise is now big business. Oracle data showed that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was trending well with players back in January, and IGN secured rights for exclusive Expedition 33 merch as a result. In the end, this merchandise sold 16% more across 60 days than did IGN’s popular Fallout TV show merchandise, even though it was based on a new IP.
Loyalty has changed
Millennials and Gen X tend to be loyal to platforms or genres – now, the younger generations tend to be more loyal to specific experiences. They no longer identify as gamers – they identify as players of a specific game.
Game communities now behave much like sports fans, and celebrate content drops in games like League of Legends much like the release of entirely new games. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a rebound in interest in eSports, led by one-on-one fighting games, which are the easiest for audiences to follow and understand.
The upcoming 2D fighting game Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls proved to be a big hit with IGN’s audience when it was revealed this summer, and the wireless PlayStation fighting stick, Project Defiant, garnered an enormous 6 million views on IGN social media.
Nostalgia and new IP
Every two years, IGN conducts a study into audience attitudes towards older games, and the findings have shown that people are increasingly looking back. Now, 71% agree that they’re feeling more and more nostalgic for franchises that were around when they were kids.
But there’s still room for new IP to breakthrough, as shown by the success of games like Split Fiction and Black Myth: Wukong – the latter peaking at 2.2 million concurrent players on Steam.
Where Winds Meet and Blood Message are likely to be the next two big hits from China on the basis of Oracle data, possibly reaching the same scale of success as Black Myth: Wukong.
Subscription services are getting bigger and bigger, and old games on these services will always be new to someone, just like how the nineties sitcom Friends attracted a whole new generation of fans when it came to Netflix. Gen Z and Gen Alpha now expect every song and TV show to be available to them instantly, and they expect the same for video games.
IGN has found that nostalgia-based content has been huge on Humble, including Tomb Raider, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, which have driven big increases in subscriptions.
The biggest upcoming games
There were 770 games announced in the 2025 summer showcases, and the movement of GTA 6’s release date into 2026 has meant games have flooded into the September to November release window that publishers were previously trying to avoid.
Some of the new titles that drove the biggest traffic on IGN were Resident Evil: Requiem, Metal Gear Solid Delta, Silent Hill F, 007 First Light, Pragmata, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, and Ghost of Yotei.
IGN Entertainment promises there’s much more to come from Gaming Trends – its next report will look back on the predictions above to see if they were actually right. So, popcorn at the ready.
IGN Entertainment is the parent company of GamesIndustry.biz.
