The British games industry just hit a record £8.76 billion – and the most exciting bit for 2026 isn’t even GTA VI
Key Points
- UK consumer spend on video games hit a record £8.76 billion in 2025, up 7.4% year on year, the highest ever recorded
- Ukie tells HotMinute the 2026 slate "would be remarkable in any year", with Fable, Rust, RuneScape and No Man's Sky leading UK developed titles
- Digital console spending rose 9.2% to £2.49 billion, lifted by Nintendo Switch 2 selling 10 million units globally in four months
- Game Culture (film, TV, merchandise) jumped 42% to £566 million, with A Minecraft Movie taking a record £56.8 million at the UK box office
- UK games industry has doubled in a decade, supports 73,000 jobs and contributes £6 billion GVA to the economy each year
UK consumers spent £8.76 billion on video games in 2025, up 7.4% year on year, the highest valuation the British market has ever recorded.
The figure comes from Ukie’s 2025 Consumer Market Valuation, which the trade body published at the London Games Festival in April.
British households spent more on games in 2025, even as the cost of living squeezed nearly every other category. Ukie CEO Nick Poole called it “a remarkable vote of confidence in the medium”.
Ukie is the trade body for the UK’s video games and interactive entertainment industry, representing developers, publishers, and supporting businesses on policy, regulation, and economic advocacy.
A Ukie spokesperson told HotMinute that the 2026 release slate “would be remarkable in any year”, and Grand Theft Auto VI was almost an afterthought in the answer.
The names that came up first were Fable returning for a major AAA release, evergreen UK titles like Rust, No Man’s Sky, RuneScape, and Star Citizen pushing major content drops, and a wave of indie games, “many of them made right here in the UK”.
Beyond Rockstar
The list reads like a snapshot of the British studio scene at full stretch. Playground Games in Leamington Spa is delivering the headline UK-developed AAA moment of the year with Fable’s return.
UK studios are also pushing major content drops on Rust and RuneScape. Hello Games in Guildford keeps shipping updates to No Man’s Sky almost a decade after launch.
James Bond and Star Wars releases will feature across multiple titles, broadening the cultural footprint well beyond Rockstar’s behemoth.
Inside the headline figure, the breakdown is striking. Software spending climbed 7% to £6.03 billion, hardware grew 3% to £2.17 billion, and Game Culture (Ukie’s term for games related film, TV and merchandise) jumped 42% to £566 million.
Digital console spending alone rose 9.2% to £2.49 billion, with a new generation hardware installed base now reaching maturity. Nintendo launched the Switch 2 in June 2025, and it surpassed 10 million units globally within its first four months on sale.
The studios Ukie is betting on
The strategic argument the spokesperson kept returning to was about the ecosystem, not any individual game.
“The global games market is crowded and fiercely competitive, but what other regions cannot replicate is our ecosystem, the combination of deep technical expertise, creative culture, world-class business infrastructure and regulatory clarity,” the spokesperson said.
That is the case Ukie is making behind its Made in the UK campaign, which exists to surface the studios behind the games rather than the games themselves.
At the indie end, the spokesperson singled out Spilt Milk, Inkle, and Nosebleed Interactive as evidence that the UK can produce viral hits with tiny teams.
Coal Supper sits among a generation bringing “distinctly British sensibilities” to genre-defining work.
At the larger end, Rebellion and Frontier Developments stand as proof that homegrown studios can scale internationally without losing their identity.
The category nobody is talking about
The most surprising number in the data was not the headline figure or the console numbers.
Game Culture grew 42% in 2025 to £566 million. Toys and merchandising alone hit £333 million, up 43%. Games-related film and TV revenue jumped 70% to £159 million, with A Minecraft Movie grossing £56.8 million at the UK box office, the highest figure ever recorded for a video game film in British cinema.
UK gaming IP now competes across formats well beyond the controller.
The UK games industry has more than doubled in size over the last decade.
It supports over 73,000 jobs and contributes £6 billion in gross value added to the UK economy each year, with studios trading from Dundee to Leamington Spa, Manchester to Guildford.
The £8.76 billion figure was always going to make the headlines, but the answer Ukie kept returning to was simpler: the depth of the British catalogue, and the studios behind it, is the part nobody else can copy.
