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It’s harder than ever for a new video game to crack the top of the most-played list. According to the Circana Player Engagement Tracker and video game market analyst Mat Piscatella, in 2025, the top five most-played games on PS5 and Xbox… were the same in 2024. And they likely won’t be changing anytime soon.
Any gaming enthusiast could probably easily name the top five: Fortnite, Roblox, Call of Duty, Minecraft, and Grand Theft Auto V. These aren’t just the most-played games of ’24 and ’25, but have hovered at or around the top of the most-played list for several years now. Though they vary wildly in genre and gameplay, they have a handful of shared characteristics that inform some of their success. All of them are established games, around for eight years or more. They all are multiplatform and have multiplayer capabilities, numerous gameplay modes, and are constantly updated with new content. With the exception of Call of Duty, all the games extensively feature user-generated content while Fortnite and Roblox are free to play.
Eager to replicate the financial success of the top five and using those shared characteristics as a guideline, studios and publishers have spent years trying to build their own live-service hits. Overwatch, Apex Legends, Valorant, and the Destiny 2 expansions enjoyed decent success, inspiring even more studios to make yet more live-service games. Square Enix, a developer not known for premium multiplayer experiences (with one well-memed exception), released Foamstars. Rocksteady and BioWare, studios celebrated for their single-player narrative games, announced Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Anthem. In 2022, Sony announced that it was working to launch 10 live-service games before March 2026. But a year later, Sony scaled back those plans — nearly every studio did.
Numerous games launched then failed for lack of quality or players. Square Enix announced that it would cease updates for Foamstars less than a year post-launch. Kill the Justice League also didn’t make it to a year when Rocksteady released its final content update. Anthem will be a few weeks shy of its seventh anniversary when it shuts down on January 12th, and after spending eight years in development, Concord was taken down in weeks. Developers learned too late that the characteristics that make the power five so successful are stopping other games from reaching the top.
The newest game of the bunch, Fortnite, has been around since 2017. It’s hard to ask a player that’s racked up eight years worth of Victory Royales, currency, battle pass progression, and skins to start over somewhere new. People also want to play games with their friends. If everyone you know is playing Call of Duty, guess what you’re gonna play? Meanwhile, as prices increase both in gaming and globally, players are buying fewer new titles or consoles. Why spend money on a premium title like Concord and the fancy, expensive PS5 needed to play it, when Fortnite and Roblox are free and work on hardware you already have. It’s similar on PC. While the top of the Steam charts fluctuate more often than PlayStation or Xbox, new live-service games there are always competing against the usual PC suspects — PUBG, Counter-Strike 2, and Dota 2.
But for all the carnage of games released to little fanfare or killed before they could even launch, it’s not impossible for new live-service games to find success — just not at the same scale as a Fortnite or GTA. Games like Helldivers 2, Marvel Rivals, and (for better or worse) Arc Raiders have been able to punch through the seeming inexhaustible noise of the top five, topping player-count charts not only on Xbox and PS5 but PC as well. Gaming in 2025 was also defined by games like Ghost of Yotei, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hades II, and Hollow Knight: Silksong, possibly signaling that developing single-player narrative experiences might be a safer bet. These five games aren’t going anywhere and will likely top the charts again, but in 2026, they’ll definitely have to make room for at least one new addition: Grand Theft Auto VI — that is if it isn’t delayed.
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