Why the gaming industry is expecting a 'rebound' this year
Gaming demand has cooled since the pandemic, but major launches and tech advances are reigniting interest.
Lewis Ward, IDC Research director of gaming and interactive 3D software, joins Asking for a Trend to break down what to expect from the gaming industry, Nintendo's (NTDOY) next-gen Switch, and how Nvidia (NVDA) chips are shaping the industry's future.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.
I want to start high level, Lewis, because I want your take on how healthy the gaming industry is right now. Um, you know, during the pandemic, Lewis, I I used to call you then for your your very smart insight and analysis on this industry. You know, it's been a while. Um, you listen, people were home, gaming was the thing to do, but spinning ahead now, Lewis, May 2025. How healthy, how resilient, what kind of growth are we seeing?
I think it really depends on the region. So globally, things were pretty flat if not down last year, and they've kind of been trending lower since the pandemic spike you mentioned, like 2021, 2022. In 2025, we do expect a rebound. We expect mobile growth worldwide to be up high single digits, consoles to be up maybe mid single digits, and PC-based spending up low single digits. But having said that, the US, I mean there's just a lot of uncertainty around the tariff situation and uh physical goods, right? So not just PCs and gaming systems, but all the accessories and everything else that goes along with it if they're made in China, right? And so, uh, in the US, for example, uh we're projecting slower growth than those global rates uh partly because we're kind of anticipating a negative hit, and how negative is, is, you know, very much up in the air.
Let me ask you, Louis, you mentioned consoles. I want to dig into that because next week got Nintendo, right, introducing the Switch 2, which uses Nvidia's chips. How popular is that device going to be, Lewis? What what do you think demand's going to look like?
Right. Well, uh, I think it'll be close to what Switch has done. So maybe, uh, you know, I'm kind of hedging my bets here, but basically, uh, through the first four years on the market. So my current forecast goes through 2028. We have Switch 2 shipping about 83 million units. Switch, original Switch and all the other skews associated with it, did about 80 million over its first four years on the market. So it's a little bit ahead, but Switch also launched one quarter earlier in the first quarter of 2017 versus the second quarter of 2025. So once you net those out, the difference is, you know, within the margin of error, basically. So we're effectively expecting the hardware at least to more or less do what Switch has done.
And then the Switch 2, I mentioned, Lewis, so using Nvidia chips. Can you explain for folks what those Nvidia chips do for video games, for the industry? Why they're so sought after?
Well, you know, Nvidia's been, um, out in front of a lot of trends related to GPUs in particular, right? So, uh, the the RTX, I think it's, uh, series 50 today, is, you know, cutting edge in terms of the power and performance, right? So the number of frame rates you can get per second in a high-end PC game, for example, in their GPUs. But you mentioned the consoles, and so what we expect for Switch 2 is that some games, um, you know, will be playable on Switch 2 which simply were not playable on original Switch consoles. So, um, uh, the Cyber Cyberpunk 2027, 2077 is coming out for Switch 2. I think I'm going to try to get a copy of that to see how quickly it runs, but supposedly some of these games are going to run at, you know, 40, 50, 60 frames a second, and possibly have ray tracing, which is like a a very much a leap forward, right? So at the end of the day, what you get with them, uh, relative to, you know, AMD has his own chips and Nvidia, uh, sorry, Intel's trying to get in around the corner with Arc, uh, Battlemage, I believe, is their new GPU. But at the end of the day, you know, they're kind of setting the benchmark for what high-end GPUs can do, and basically, you know, we expect, um, faster performance, uh, higher frame rates, better-looking games, right? At the end of the day, that's what gamers are willing to pay for.
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