Any studio looking to release a new live service game in 2026 needs to take a long hard look at what the most played games in the US were last year.
The start of a new year should instil everyone with a sense of anticipation and the thought of new possibilities. But for the games industry at least, the last few years have brought more worries than excitement.
As we laid out in our end of year review, 2025 belonged to indie studios, thanks to successes like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Hollow Knight: Silksong. And in an ideal world, larger publishers would learn a thing or two from these smaller developers.
At the very least, it’d be nice to see publishers stop pinning all their hopes on live service games and becoming the next Fortnite, because it’s simply not going to happen. If you need further evidence of that, just take a look at what most people in the US were playing last year.
Circana analyst Mat Piscatella took to Bluesky to share the top five most played video games in the US, on both PlayStation and Xbox consoles, according to a survey of ‘active’ gamers.
On PlayStation, the top five were Fortnite, Call Of Duty, GTA 5, Minecraft, and Roblox. And on Xbox, it’s the exact same list, with the only difference being Roblox and Minecraft’s positions are swapped.
These are all long-running games with a heavy emphasis on multiplayer and have been consistently updated over the years – with only Call Of Duty being a traditional yearly release.
What’s especially telling is that, according to Piscatella, these lists are unchanged compared to 2024. The order’s slightly different for Xbox, but it’s still the same five games.
Fortnite is the youngest of the bunch, having launched in 2017, which means no other games, live service ones or otherwise, have managed to come close to this list’s level of popularity in the last eight years.
Knowing this, it’s hard to imagine things being any different this time next year. Call Of Duty may drop a couple of places thanks to Black Ops 7, which only launched two months ago and has been a relative flop, at least by the series’ standards.
While there are no public figures on console, SteamDB’s data shows Call Of Duty has been bleeding players for years on PC, with even 2024’s well received Black Ops 6 bucking the trend.
Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders may be the go-to multiplayer shooters for the moment but Call Of Duty clearly has a tight stranglehold on the gaming community when it’s still among the most played games in the US despite its online reputation.
This knowledge should be a turn-off for any studio hoping to break into the live service games market, but comments from Ubisoft suggest it’s unperturbed (even after multiple failures) and the big closure of The Game Awards 2025 was a new live service shooter from the Apex Legends creators called Highguard, that’s set to launch later this month.
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