The list of the most played video games in the United States during 2025 paints a stark picture of market stagnation, serving as a sobering warning for any studio considering a new live-service launch in 2026.
A Familiar and Depressing Line-Up
According to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, who shared data from a survey of 'active' gamers on Bluesky, the top five most played titles on both PlayStation and Xbox consoles were virtually identical to the previous year. For PlayStation, the order was Fortnite, Call Of Duty, Grand Theft Auto 5, Minecraft, and Roblox. On Xbox, the same five games featured, with only Roblox and Minecraft swapping places.
This consistency is particularly telling. Fortnite, the youngest game in this group, launched back in 2017. This means that for eight consecutive years, no new game—live-service or otherwise—has managed to disrupt the entrenched popularity of these established giants. All are long-running titles with a heavy focus on multiplayer, sustained by continual updates over many years.
Indie Success Fails to Shift Major Publisher Strategy
The dominance of these ageing live-service behemoths stands in sharp contrast to the wider narrative of 2025, a year that belonged to innovative indie studios. Critical and commercial successes like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and the long-awaited Hollow Knight: Silksong proved the vitality of the sector. Yet, larger publishers appear undeterred in their pursuit of a live-service 'golden ticket'.
Evidence of this stubborn focus came at The Game Awards 2025, where the big closing reveal was Highguard, a new live-service shooter from the creators of Apex Legends, set for release soon. This comes despite a market seemingly locked down by a handful of titles and multiple high-profile live-service failures in recent years.
Call of Duty's Unshakeable Grip and the Future Forecast
Even underperformance within the top tier seems unable to dislodge these games. Analyst Piscatella noted that Call Of Duty may slip a place or two in 2026 due to the relatively poor reception of Black Ops 7, which launched only two months before the year's end. This follows a years-long trend of declining player numbers on PC, as tracked by SteamDB, which even the well-received Black Ops 6 in 2024 could not reverse.
Despite this, and the presence of popular alternatives like Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders, Call of Duty maintains a formidable stranglehold on the console community. Given the entrenched nature of these top five games, it is difficult to imagine the list changing significantly by this time next year. For developers and publishers, the message from the 2025 play charts is clear: breaking into the live-service elite is now a monumental challenge, suggesting that resources might be better spent pursuing the kind of innovative, complete experiences that defined the indie success stories of the last year.
