While sports games find their main audience on consoles, their performance on PC has been in focus a lot more in recent years due to the platform's resurgence in popularity. 2025 has been an interesting year for the genre in this regard. Games outside of the big, recognizable franchises that tend to dominate this category with their annual releases seem to have fared far better than their serialized counterparts.
According to the data available on SteamDB, EA's free-to-play skateboarding title Skate had the most successful launch of any sports game on Steam in 2025, reaching a peak concurrent user count of 134,901. That makes it the fourth most-popular sports game of all time on the platform by that metric behind Football Manager 2020, Hyperdrive Massacre and Rocket League. At the same time, much of Skate's audience has migrated away again, with the game recording weekly peaks between 8,000 and 10,000 CCU.
EA Sports FC 26 managed 100,283 CCU at its peak on Steam, ranking it below FIFA 23, FC 25 and FC 24. There's been a bit of an up and down between releases over the last couple of years, but the drop-off between FC 26 and 25 is bigger than the one from FIFA 23 to FC 24. Still, FC 26 continues to bring between 60,000 and 80,000 CCU on to EA's servers during weekends, which looks similar to F1 25.
Joining the podium is one of the surprises of 2025, Rematch. It reached a peak of 92,841 CCU without any established fanbase, putting it above the launch numbers of established series like the F1 games, Need for Speed, Forza Horizon and NBA 2K. The bad news for Sloclap seems to be a lack of retention: Only a hard core of 4,000 players during weekend peak times have stuck around, which is getting into dangerous territory for a live-service game.
2025's biggest sports game success story is arguably Umamusume: Pretty Derby, the roguelike gacha title from Japanese developer Cygames. Its global release racked up 87,453 CCU on PC and made the game a viral hit across the internet thanks to its satisfying game mechanics and the charming combination of anime characters and real-world horse racing history. Similar to most other sports games, which have their main fanbases on consoles, Umamusume is mainly a mobile game, but still draws in between 17,000 and 20,000 PC players every weekend.
Following close behind is the one sports game that calls PC its true home: Football Manager 26. It launched with a peak of 84,909 CCU, which is lower than all previous entries from this decade aside from FM 2023. However, with weekend peaks of around 60,000 CCU, the management sim is still in great post-release shape.
Narrowly missing the all-time top 25 in this metric is the recently released Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road with 52,795 CCU and a strongly positive user rating of 90 percent -- an outlier among sports games, which usually divide opinions.
NBA 2K26 and F1 25 are certainly on the backfoot compared to previous releases, however. 2K's latest basketball sim managed a peak of 32,081 CCU on PC, barely putting it into the top five games of the franchise by this metric. Compared to its immediate predecessor, 2K26 lost more than 20,000 players somewhere along the way after a period of overall growth on the platform.
F1 25 only reached a worrying 22,595 CCU despite the sport's recent burst in popularity. That puts it below F1 2021, F1 22 and F1 2020 and might have contributed to the decision to make F1 26 an add-on to the current game and focus on F1 27 as the next big entry into the series.
Madden NFL 26 isn't really making any headway either, peaking at 6,600 CCU on PC this past weekend. Madden NFL 24 retains its crown as the most popular series entry on the platform with a peak CCU of 9,526.