As of April 22, we now have the first three Circana reports of 2026: January, February and March. That means we now have a picture, of sorts, of what the first quarter of year through sales charts and year-to-date information.
And that means that it’s time for my quarterly check-in with Circana’s head of game reports, Mat Piscatella. We caught up recently on how 2026 is going so far — the good, the bad and the ugly.
I’ve spoken with Piscatella before, most recently in January when we spoke about 2025’s sales trends and what to expect for the future. At the time, he noted the increasing reliance on subscription spending and price increases to drive growth in the industry. This time we were speaking more about the early trends of 2026 and what burgeoning trends he sees from the year so far.
In brief, it’s standard practice so far, but there have been a few positive surprises. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
GamesBeat: First of all, how are things going?
Piscatella: In the games world? Given everything happening with macroeconomic conditions around things like higher prices and everything else going on… Overall, it’s about as good as we can hope for in the video game spending side of things. Pretty good growth, overall spending up 5% in the first quarter, great hardware thanks to the Switch 2. Some big releases came out that really helped, and subscriptions continue to do pretty well this year. Overall, not too shabby.
GamesBeat: I noticed that Asha Sharma seems to have come in and sliced Game Pass’s price, at least.
Piscatella: Yeah, this seems to be the first step. People were reporting on the internal memo about her position on Game Pass being 1) too expensive, and 2) needing to evolve over time. This is probably step one, and then how it evolves from here is going to be interesting.
Subscriptions have been a strong area of spend for the market in general. People are gravitating to that a little bit more, and have been willing to pay the higher prices in general. There are always caveats, but the increase in spend in subscriptions is a price-driven story where the higher prices over time have been more or less absorbed — whether happily or not so much by the player base. But this should help.
GamesBeat: That leads into the main question I was going to ask. How is 2026 going so far compared to your expectations for how it was going to go? I know, going into this year, I was thinking it was going to be “Holding pattern, holding pattern, holding pattern, Grand Theft Auto 6, holding pattern, 2027.”
Piscatella: Kind of, but we’ve had a couple of bumps. The thing that’s going to throw a wrench into things is the Switch 2 launch comp, starting in June. Last June, we got a big boost from the Switch 2 hitting the market. What’s happening now until June is this kind of misaligned comparison where we have a Switch 2 this year versus us not having it last year. We have a little bit of benefit there.
I was expecting we’d get single-digit growth. It’s a little bit better than I thought. I wasn’t expecting something like a Crimson Desert or a Pokemon Pokopia to be quite as big as they’ve been, so a little bit better than expected. Really, what we’re going to have comp to is Switch 2. Then GTA 6: Is it or isn’t it? Is it November or is it March? Of course the stake is in the ground that it’s going to be November, but that’s happened before.
GamesBeat: It seems like it’s about 90% iconic franchises doing well so far. Pokemon Pokopia, Resident Evil Requiem, MLB: The Show (which always does well in March). Then you’ve got something like Crimson Desert coming out of nowhere. I know the numbers aren’t in for it yet, but I’ve seen a lot of positive chatter for Pragmata. Is that enthusiasm reflected in what you see in the market?
Piscatella: Yeah, I think, ever since the January where Helldivers 2 and Palworld showed up, that seemed to me to be an inflection point where all of a sudden, instead of banking on the annualized releases, now we’re saying, “Okay, there are going to be a few known IP that are going to have the biggest launches of all time. We’re gonna have one or two games every month that everyone jumps on board with, and then everything else is going to struggle.”
That’s basically what we’ve been seeing, the success has become more concentrated. The biggest games and biggest hits are getting more share of that pie, where all of the other games coming out — and there are still so many games coming out — just miss. No one’s talking about them. They kind of disappear, and everyone focuses on those big successes, but there are a whole bunch of games that aren’t among that group. It seems more of a concentration of attention, time and dollars.
[We spoke here at length about the struggle of indie games — and some AA and even AAA games — that struggle to get even a sliver of attention. Darwin’s Paradox, from Konami, was a particular example.]
Piscatella: Everyone has focused so much attention on the Clair Obscurs of the world when that is more akin to hitting the Powerball than it is having a reliable… 90% of them don’t do okay, because there are so many every single day. So many! Exponential growth in the number of releases! There’s no easy way in this market right now. There is no, “All you gotta do is…” No, that’s not how it works.
GamesBeat: Have there been any surprises this quarter, positive or negative?
Piscatella: Yeah, a few. Crimson Desert, obviously, is the big one. Our projected full market spend has it as the number two seller of the year behind Resident Evil Requiem. Slay the Spire 2 was also a much bigger hit than anyone had been anticipating. And Pokemon Pokopia… I think everyone was expecting it to do pretty good, but I think it’s been a system seller, and one of the big drivers of the market.
On the other side, you have games that are in the rankings, but probably aren’t doing what folks hoped those games would do.
GamesBeat: How do you think the market is going to change as we get closer to November (running with the presumption that GTA VI launches then)? There are still several quarters until then in which publishers can schedule things.
Piscatella: Generally, vibes are going to be pretty good until June, because comps are going to bein the market’s favor. We’re likely going to continue to see, depending on what games come out and how they do, growth year-on-year through June.
Then we’re going to have that Switch 2 comp, and things are going to go the other way. We’re going to be comparing to a launch period for one of the bestselling hardware systems of all time to date. Then the vibes are going to get a little more sketchy. Then we’ll lead into GTA.
We’re still anticipating the year to finish at around +3.3% versus last year. If you lose GTA, we’re probably more in the flat range. Overall, it’s… it’s fine. We could use a couple of surprises along the way. But that’s always the case.
GamesBeat: I’m curious what those might be. It’s so impossible to predict what’s going to strike a chord in this industry.
Piscatella: It is impossible! When I get asked that question, I say that if I knew what that game was, I’d be out making it.