PC gamers are more likely to choose co-op and storyline, while interest in competitive games is declining, — Newzoo report

In 2024, PC gamers on Steam chose story and cooperative games more often than competitive ones.

A report by Newzoo showed that 58% of the games chosen by players were non-competitive PvE projects. For comparison, 42% of PlayStation users and 41% of Xbox users preferred such story-based or cooperative projects.

Newzoo analysts attribute this to the popularity of the so-called «socially oriented titles». The phrase from the report is vague, but it refers to games that offer a chaotic and cooperative experience where interaction between players is key. These include Helldivers 2, Lethal Company or a recent hits simulator Schedule 1 and R.E.P.O. All of these games are united by a fun cooperative format rather than a PvP competition format.

And Steam itself favors such games: thanks to its lower entry barrier, the platform attracts indie developers. Their limited budgets force them to avoid spending money on servers for competitive multiplayer interaction. Instead, they create PvE experiences that are often more original.

The likelihood that a player will choose storylines or cooperatives increases with the number of projects played. On Steam, this is much more noticeable than on PlayStation and Xbox: if a PC user plays more than one game a year, the probability of choosing PvE jumps sharply upwards. Newzoo calls this the «hockey stick effect».

But the study has a number of limitations. First, it does not take into account players from China and India, which significantly reduces the global representativeness of the sample. Secondly, it does not separate PvE games into single-player and cooperative ones. It also does not consider the duration of sessions — a player could play several PvE projects but spend much more time in PvP.

The 2025 Gaming Industry Trends Report is based on telemetry data from over a million players. Only games that a person played for at least two hours were considered for the study.

However, according to Newzoo, the general trend for PC players is obvious: more and more of them are looking for cooperation or immersion in the story rather than competition. And it is for such users that Steam is now the number one platform.

Source: PC Gamer