Industry report says Steam users play more noncompetitive games than console players—and our interest in PvE keeps growing

In popular conception, the gamer is an individual preoccupied with virtual conquest—in shooters, in MOBAs, or in any other format allowing for what the ancients once called "pwning," before the term was rightfully culled from common parlance. PC players, however, aren't as preoccupied with PvP. According to industry analysts, Steam users are more likely than console players to play noncompetitive games, and that interest keeps increasing.

In its 2025 report on games industry trends, market research company Newzoo had surveyed "raw telemetry data taken from over 1 million players" to compare gameplaying trends on different platforms. Examining the games that each player in its dataset had played at least two hours of, Newzoo said that 58% of the games played by Steam users in 2024 were entirely noncompetitive PvE games, compared to 42% of games played on PlayStation and 41% of games played on Xbox.

Newzoo's data shows that Steam user interest in PvE games has seen steady yearly increases, growing from 47% in 2021.

Newzoo attributes the "increasingly more PvE-friendly" Steam userbase to the growing popularity of what it calls "social-focused titles." The terminology's a bit clunky, but it doesn't seem inaccurate when you count how many breakout hits in recent years—like Helldivers 2, Lethal Company, and more recently Schedule 1—have been focused primarily on jolly cooperative mayhem.

I suspect the differences in platform offerings play a role here, too. Steam has a lower barrier to entry for smaller developers, providing PC players a wider breadth of indie games that—while incomparably weird and beautiful—are more likely to be made on tighter budgets that can't as easily accommodate the additional development and networking costs of competitive multiplayer.

There are some asterisks on the data that bear mentioning. For one thing, it doesn't seem like Newzoo's survey differentiates between singleplayer and multiplayer games; calling a singleplayer game a PvE game isn't wrong, but it does feel a little redundant. These charts also don't compare playtime; a player might have played a higher number of PvE games while spending more hours overall in PvP games.

More of note, however, is that Newzoo's panel doesn't include player data from China and India. It's safe to say that without player metrics from the Chinese and Indian markets, which together comprise more than a billion people playing video games, Newzoo's panel isn't entirely representative of global gaming preferences.

Interestingly, Newzoo noted that across all three platforms, the more games someone plays in a year, the more likely it is that the games they're playing are PvE titles. But while the increase is a more gradual one on both consoles, Steam players show "a notable hockey stick effect," where the likelihood of noncompetitive interest jumps dramatically as soon as a Steam player is playing more than one game a year.

To me, there's an intuitive logic to those numbers. While PC gaming has grown more approachable in the last decade, it's still a more enthusiast market. Competitive games have the broadest market appeal, so those are the games someone is likely to pick up if they only play one or two games in a year. PvE games are the ones more likely to be filling fan wikis and user-made spreadsheets penned by devoted weirdos.

For players who hang up their Discord chat with their Marvel Rivals crew and immediately go looking for sicko stuff to play, PC remains destination number one.