Markets

You play a lot of Canadian-made games, but you'd never know it. Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six are built in Quebec, Mass Effect and Dragon Age in Edmonton, EA Sports FC and NHL in Burnaby and, sadly, almost none of it is owned by Canadian companies. Ubisoft answers to Paris, EA to California and, since August 2026, to a Saudi led consortium. The happy exception: Dead by Daylight, which is still independent after ten years. All of it adds 5.1 billion dollars to GDP, a little under half what film and television manage. About 20 million Canadians play, roughly half the country, though that number is a much softer estimate than the studio figures. Canada is better at counting its studios than its players.

They said only Nixon could go to China, but these days China comes to you. In 2024, Game Science's Black Myth: Wukong became the second most played game in Steam's history: a big budget action game inspired by Journey to the West, a novel every Chinese schoolchild knows. Genshin Impact and Honor of Kings had already gone global, and Chinese developed games earned 20.5 billion dollars overseas in 2025. At home sit 683 million players spending 350.8 billion yuan in 2025, twice as many players as the United States has people. The traffic runs both ways: League of Legends and Clash of Clans belong to Tencent, a position the US government is reported to be reviewing. Unsurprisingly, China manages protects its game industry. Nothing releases in the market without a publication licence, the 版号 (banhao). Play time for under 18s is officially restricted to an hour a day, on Fridays, weekends and holidays.

Ubisoft, one of the world's most recognizable game makers, is French. So is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the universally acclaimed 2025 RPG. There's a reason French games tend to be cinematic and breathtaking: production money runs through the CNC, the same agency that funds French film, and a game has to pass a cultural scale before the 30 percent production tax credit applies — l'exception culturelle, extended to the controller. The French audience is broad and old: 40.2 million people, more than seven in ten, at an average age of 40, spending 5.856 billion euros in 2025. Discs still sell here after they have stopped selling in countries next door. And the state keeps legislating ahead of the market, running a three year experiment regulating web3 games through its gambling regulator.

Germans play a lot of work simulators. Nobody can quite explain why, save for the fact that they simply have a national fondness for vehicles and machinery. The country's best known game exports fit the pattern: Anno and The Settlers are economic simulations, too. Germans also still buy games as objects. More than half of console games sold here come on a disc, in a market that has otherwise gone two thirds digital. Germany is, by its own trade association's account, Europe's largest games market, and it barely makes any games: around 9.4 billion euros spent in 2025 across about 37.5 million players, with games developed in Germany accounting for roughly 5.5 percent of that spending. What Germany really hosts is the industry itself: gamescom drew about 357,000 people to Cologne in 2025. Age ratings here are law rather than advice, and retailers are bound by them.

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.

Mario, Zelda and Pokémon are Japanese, and so is a good deal of the vocabulary gamers are accustomed to: the boss fight, the JRPG, and the fighting game. Home consoles may have been an American invention, but Japan rescued them after the industry collapsed in the eighties and still exports that canon at scale. Content exports reached 5.8 trillion yen in 2023, of which games were 62 percent, a total the industry association says already exceeds Japan's semiconductor and steel exports. At home the picture is quieter: a 2.4 trillion yen market in 2024 and a player base of 54.75 million that is edging down. And the country that sells the world its games is the hardest market in this directory to research. Nintendo publishes lifetime unit sales for every major title for free, while the two national data annuals cost between 48,000 and 55,000 yen each, so headline national figures reach the public through press releases only. The largest games media brands and both data annuals share one corporate parent.

MENA is the one market in this directory that cannot be sized. No free source with a stated methodology puts a number on regional revenue, and the figures in circulation trace to paid vendors or to parties invested in the region's growth. Saudi Arabia, the largest market in scope, claims 23.5 million game enthusiasts, though that is the state's own count and enthusiast is undefined. What can be verified is ownership. The Public Investment Fund bought Scopely for 4.9 billion dollars in 2023 and completed a 55 billion dollar purchase of Electronic Arts in August 2026, and it funds and runs the Esports World Cup in Riyadh. Read English language coverage of this market as promotional until you have checked who paid for it.

Korea is the birthplace of eSports as spectator sport. StarCraft filled television schedules and stadiums here two decades before the rest of the world settled on the word esports, and the PC bang, the neighbourhood gaming café, made play a public activity rather than a bedroom one. That social-first format went global when battle royales reached the world through Krafton's PUBG: Battlegrounds. Korea is a tiny nation, and so builds for export above all, sending 8.5 billion dollars of games abroad in 2024 against 246 million imported. The government says Korea owns 7.2 percent of the world's gaming econonmy, on domestic revenue of 23.85 trillion won. Unexpectedly, that's shrinking. Game usage fell to 50.2 percent in 2025, down 9.7 points in a single year.

Grand Theft Auto is Scottish. So was Lemmings before it. Tomb Raider came out of Derby, and Rockstar North still works from Edinburgh. Britain makes games well out of proportion to its size, helped by a 34 percent expenditure credit gated by a BFI cultural test, the same apparatus that certifies British film, and UK consumers spent 8.76 billion pounds in 2025. The regulation is where it gets strange. Britain criminalises selling the wrong game to a child, since age classification has had statutory force since 2012, making it an offence to supply against the rating. On loot boxes the same government found an association with harm, declined to legislate, and asked the industry to self regulate, which the industry did, with eleven voluntary principles.

The United States has been playing longer than almost anywhere else, and its numbers are really a story about that. Pong, Doom and the whole home console habit started here, and so today the average American player is 36 and has been at it for 18 years. 212.3 million of them play every week. Fortnite and Roblox were built here too, and for a generation of American children they are less games than places to meet after school, which is where most of the 60.8 billion dollars spent in 2025 went. Nothing in the US is rated by law. The Supreme Court held in 2011 that games are protected speech, so ratings are left to the industry and by the platforms. Regulation arrives instead through consumer protection cases and state laws currently being fought over in court.