State of Gaming 2025
The year is 2025, and the games industry is in a peculiar spot - a place where technology, art, and culture collide, with revenues still rising globally, and gamers split between PC, console, and mobile, but gaming isn’t a hobby anymore, it’s a way of life, as we socialise in games, tell stories in games, and test new technology in games. However, rising hardware costs, AI-heavy development pipelines, and shifting player expectations are forcing developers to change the way they make games, sell games, and play games. In India, gaming has moved from a niche hobby to a full-fledged mainstream market, with mobile gaming still ruling the roost in terms of sheer player count, driven by affordable smartphones and the proliferation of the internet. While there has been a visible increase in the adoption of PC and consoles among urban and semi-urban gamers, where a sizeable population of players have bought proper rigs, peripherals, and subscriptions, esports viewership is at an all-time high, with large online audiences tuning in to tournaments, and an increase in the number of sponsors. Indian game development studios are shedding their traditional outsourcing and support roles and are making their own original IPs, experimenting with local stories, aesthetics, and languages, although all of this growth is happening while also being stunted by high hardware costs, spotty server quality, and limited or inconsistent regional pricing for big-budget AAA titles that keeps many of these players out of the high-end experience. To a large chunk of the audience, gaming remains something you budget for, rather than splurge on, because high-end gaming is a costly affair.
Player attention in 2025 is evenly divided between endlessly updated live-service titles and rich, focused single-player games, as on the competitive side, Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, Fortnite, and Call of Duty are eating up countless hours of multiplayer action, with their predictable loops, ranked grinds, and social* hubs, while beside them, role-playing games, survival sandboxes, and story-heavy indies are all flourishing on both PC and console. One of the most astonishing trends is the staying power of older games, as thanks to active modding communities, regular patching, and considerate expansion packs, many games are staying relevant longer than ever before in the history of this medium - even feeling “alive” years after their initial release. The last couple of award seasons have shown us that price and prestige are no longer joined at the hip, as a large proportion of the major awards - Game of the Year, Best Narrative, Best Indie, and so on - are going to games that launch for sub-$70, because players and critics alike are flocking to games that respect their time and attention - tight design, innovative ideas, and a confident scope all matter more than mere visual spectacle or sheer playtime. This is a reflection of growing exhaustion with the mega-budget projects that feel safe, overlong, or formulaic, and it’s also a message to publishers: careful craftsmanship and innovation can now take precedence over raw production scale.
AI is used all the way throughout the game development process, as it helps designers generate worlds and environments, it helps animators fill in the in-between work, it helps generate NPC behaviors that are more dynamic, and it helps to be more rapid in voice production, whether it’s through synthesis or voice cloning, and it’s even used in QA, where the automated QA tools that are used can hammer on builds in a way that’s much faster and more thorough than any human tester could possibly do. The benefit is most felt in the smaller studios, where they didn’t have the luxury of a large team and a long period of time, as they can now use AI to prototype more quickly and do more with less, but at the same time, experienced developers are also wary of relying too heavily on automation, because players can tell when a game feels a little bit hollow, and players can tell when a game hasn’t had the authored moments, the intentional pacing, and the handcrafted details that are very much the hallmark of human creativity. The studios that are getting the most goodwill are the studios that are using AI as a tool to enable and empower creativity, rather than to replace it, because when used correctly, AI can be a powerful tool for game development.
The explosion of AI workloads - both in game development and just general everyday applications - has had an impact on the consumer hardware landscape, as modern GPUs are as optimised for AI acceleration as they are for graphics, and that demand has led to skyrocketing prices and limited availability, while on the one hand, consumer hardware is more capable than it has ever been, capable of running complex simulations, advanced upscaling, and just smarter in-game systems. On the other hand, the divide between a high-end rig and a budget system has never been wider, and in price-sensitive markets like India, it’s a chasm, where players have to make hard choices between visual fidelity, performance, and affordability. The 2025 slate is full of offbeat, experimental projects, as rather than trying to create giant open worlds, many developers are focusing on smaller, denser immersive sims, inventive survival games, and genre-blending narrative experiences, because players are more open to rough edges if the core idea is bold enough - games that take creative risks, even with modest production values, are finding passionate audiences.
No Man’s Sky was a laughing stock at launch for not meeting expectations, but it’s now one of gaming’s biggest redemption stories, as of 2025, it’s a massive, feature-rich universe that has been crafted through years of free updates, with exploration, base-building, and co-op all scaling to a level that few games can match, making it a long-term comfort game for a lot of people. StarRupture represents the next generation of survival-meets-automation games, as the thrill comes from building huge industrial structures across large, hostile worlds and then living with the consequences of your creations, while co-op makes it even more enjoyable and unpredictable, but its mechanical complexity and technical requirements make it only suitable for dedicated, high-end PC players. DayZ is one of the last bastions of true emergent storytelling - a game that’s all about tension, paranoia, and human encounters, although for Indian players, it’s far from ideal, due to horrendous latency on most available servers that severely hampers gunplay and timing-based survival mechanics, and ongoing struggles with hackers and cheaters, particularly on public servers, that continues to chip away at player trust and enjoyment. Red Dead Redemption 2 still stands as the gold standard for open-world storytelling and immersion, as very few games have even come close to replicating the game’s richly detailed environments, well-written characters, and thematic heft, and for many players, it’s become a timeless single-player classic that they continue to revisit, rather than a game they play once and then forget.
The anticipation for GTA 6 is possibly greater than any other open-world game before it, as people aren’t just looking for a bigger map, they’re looking for a world that’s genuinely alive, with more reactive systems, smarter and more believable NPCs, and an online component that lives for years to come without feeling like an excuse for further exploitation, although there’s cautious optimism that the game will push technical and systemic boundaries, but also a healthy dose of concern over the monetization and launch-day performance. Prologue: Go Wayback hints at where PlayerUnknown Productions wants to go next - away from the tight battle royale loops, and into high-realism, large-scale simulation, with an emphasis on systemic survival and emergent events over carefully scripted set pieces, and if it lives up to its potential, it’ll become a Playground for stories shaped almost entirely by player choice and circumstance. Disco Elysium continues to loom large over narrative design, as its dense writing, psychological depth, and radical commitment to player choice demonstrate that you don’t need to have lots of action or photorealistic graphics to be memorable, and you can see its influence in newer games that focus on dialogue, branching storylines, and internal character conflict. Where Winds Meet is easily distinguished by its mix of martial arts, Chinese folklore, and open-world exploration, as the game’s visual style, emphasis on fluid movement, and kinetic combat all mark it as a strong alternative to the dominant Western RPG formula, and for players looking for culturally distinct worlds and different mythological frameworks, it’s one of the most intriguing titles on the horizon. There is a new genre of games that i am exploring these days, philosophy. Games like Disco Elysium, The Talos Principle, The Talos Principle 2, Pushing It! With Sisyphus, Get To Work are though provoking. I have played some this year.
The cloud gaming too has been properly introduced in India. Geforece Now by Nvidia and JIO’s Jio Gaming has been launched.
In 2025, the state of the art in gaming is not about brute power, but what you do with it, as the most storied games are not necessarily the biggest or most expensive, but the ones that use technology intelligently in service to the player, because as AI takes over, hardware economics change, and the player base disperses across the planet, the best games are the ones that balance ambition with discipline - pushing the envelope without cheating the time, money, and trust of their customers.