Italy
The country that birthed Ferrari and Ducati is also great at making video games about going fast. Assetto Corsa is built inside a racetrack. Kunos Simulazioni, the company best known for making the Assetto Corsa series, works from the pit complex at Vallelunga outside Rome, developing alongside the drivers and teams who train there. The rest of the industry is small and quietly self-sufficient. Around 200 games companies employ 2,800 people on an estimated 180 to 200 million euros of turnover, with Europe and North America taking four fifths of their output and 88 percent of it self financed. Public money exists, but as in France it arrives through the cinema law. Italians buy far more than they build. They spent nearly 2.4 billion euros in 2024 across 14 million players, about twelve euros over the counter for every euro the domestic industry earns.
Photograph https://milestone.it/es/games/motogp-25/
Market size
~€2.4 billion2024
Italian consumer spending on video games reaches nearly 2.4 billion euros in 2024, up 3 percent year on year, per IIDEA annual report presented at the Ministry of Culture in April 2025.
Source IIDEA annual report press release, trade body
Each market states its size in its own currency, for its own year, and on its own definition of what counts, which is consumer spending in some and industry revenue in others. These ten figures cannot be compared with one another.
Player population
14.2 million2025
- Not recorded
Each figure comes from a different source, a different year, and a different definition of a player. The bars show rough scale only. No free source measures every market on one method.
Trends here
Trends tagged to this market come first. Most trends in games are global, and those apply here too.
- Culture & audienceGame preservation and digital ownershipThe clearest current test of what consumers believe they are buying, and a natural experiment in which legal systems convert organised player sentiment into binding rules. So far the answer is neither Brussels nor Washington, but civil-law jurisdictions using heritage framing and consumer litigation.Perennial
- Regulation, safety & ageAge assurance comes for gamingAge verification is no longer adjacent to games, but inside them.Emerging
- Platform & distributionApp-store unbundling under court supervisionhe 30% cut shaped mobile game design for 15 years. Its replacement is a supervised patchwork of tiered fees — and gatekeeping has migrated from distribution to attestation.Dominant
Research yourself
2 of 2 sources
These rows
| Name | What it lets you find out | Type | Cost | Markets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sparkers (GSD operator) | Operator of the industry-backed GSD (Game Sales Data) project. Data covers physical + digital (PSN, Xbox Live, eShop, Steam) + streaming. Weekly UK/EU charts surface publicly via trade press (GamesIndustry.biz). Publisher participation varies (Nintendo absent from digital) Enterprise pricing is custom. | Sales tracking | Paid | UK, DE, FR, IT, EU |
| OIES | Italian esports market research and ecosystem mapping. Operates a membership and business network alongside its research output. | Market research firm | Freemium | IT |