Steel Media in 2025: Supporting the Games Industry with our biggest ever year of events and media

• A 2025 summary of the global games industry conference series Pocket Gamer Connects and Steel Media’s B2B & B2C websites
• In 2025, SM hosted 11,000 attendees from over 4,500 companies and more than 100 countries across nine global events – including four new locations.
• PocketGamer.Biz reached an average of 200K unique industry visitors every month
• B2C sister site PocketGamer.Com grew to an average of almost 2M monthly visitors

Stay Informed

Get Industry News In Your Inbox…

Sign Up Today

Steel Media’s mission has always been a simple one: to support, celebrate and connect the games industry, wherever it exists and whatever platform or genre it adopts. 

As we enter our 20th year absolutely nothing about this has changed, apart from perhaps the scale, with 2025 seeing the SM team deliver our biggest year to date on pretty much every front – events, websites and social media all breaking records.

By the numbers, the TLDR version…

Attention spans are limited, so in case you don’t get round to reading the full round-up, here’s a data digest. In 2025 Steel Media…

• Ran 8x PGC conferences (6x full two dayers, 2x one day summits, 5 the biggest in their country or region!)

• Hosted over 11,000 delegates from 4,500 companies and over 100 countries

• Facilitated 15,000+ organised meetings via Meet-to-Match (plus many more on the show floor and at 9 curated fringe events, 16 parties and 5 supper clubs!)

• Arranged 7x Big Indie Pitches, showcasing over 150 studios

• Sent 3.2 Million marketing mails…

• Grew our social media reach by over 51%

• Posted the highest ever visitor and page view numbers for PocketGamer.Biz (200K users, 400K p/views p/month) and PocketGamer.Com (1.9M vsitors, 7.5M p/views)

An eventful start to the year! 

2025 saw the most PG Connects events ever in one year, with no fewer than 8 outings of the games industry’s leading independent b2b conference.

PGC London kicked off the year in style with our biggest ever show, (at least so far – 2026 looks certain to take that crown!), welcoming 2,600+ delegates from 1,300+ companies and 66 countries to the iconic Brewery. Not only has this become the UK’s biggest b2b games event, but it’s an essential first stop on the global games industry tour for the mobile games industry with many delegates claiming it’s more important to their business than any other event on the calendar.

The audience level certainly reflected that, with 68% senior managers and nearly a third of attendees being C-Level, and they were clearly intent on getting business done – with 5,000 formal meetings taking place via meet-to-match and many more via fringe events and ample networking parties. There was plenty of knowledge sharing too, with over 280 expert speakers across 31 tracks covering pretty much every conceivable subject from game creation and marketing to monetisation and live ops.

The Top 50 UK Game Makers were revealed, along with the Top 50 Blockchain Game Companies, and we also ran a Big Screen Gaming side summit focused primarily on PC and Console business and underlining the fact that although PGC had its roots and heart in the mobile games business, this was very much an event for every part of the industry. Whilst 82% of attendees were interested in mobile, 48% were PC/Mac, 40% console, 27% web-gaming, 22% XR, 14% Web3 and 13% focused on streaming services.

And the events kept on coming…

PGC San Francisco continued the momentum in March, with over 1,000 delegates taking the opportunity to connect at the show and VIP mixer, along with several thousands more joining for our annual party. And all this in the face of a challenging time for American visitors with politics, prices and inner city problems seeing many stay away from GDC.

Onto May, and the Dubai Games Expo Summit once again exceeded our expectations in delivering the most popular and all round best b2b games industry show in the Emirates (if not the MENA region) with 1,400 delegates from 600 companies and a staggering 70 countries! This year felt like a real tipping point between those ‘checking out’ the event and region with a curious eye, to actual business being done – with the meeting tables rammed throughout. The addition of the Investor Summit and Dragon’s Den style ‘Pitch Play’ event certainly didn’t hurt, nor did the return of the MENA Games Industry Awards, celebrating the best companies and individuals from across the industry – including this year’s MENA Mobile Legend, MJ Fahmi!

The roll continued with new arrival PGC Barcelona in June, a genuine passion project, which very much showed in an event that was a triumph from start to finish. The event in the beautiful Catalan capital was our biggest launch event ever and (to our knowledge) the largest Spanish b2b games industry event to date with over 1,000 delegates from around the region and the world gathering together to enjoy two packed days of talks, meetings and fabulous after parties.

And coming…

Next up, we moved further East, as our first PGC Summit Shanghai, created in association with publisher MyGamez, marked a strong return to Asia, packing over 600 into a fabulous river side hotel venue. The new one-day summit format did its job in connecting companies from east and west and served as an accessible launching point into the wonderful madness of ChinaJoy and the ever growing Chinese market.

August saw us back to Gamescom in Cologne, hosting the 9th iteration of the Mobile Games Awards, celebrating the very best companies across the global ecosystem with a sitdown dinner and awards presentation. Scopely, Supercell, King and Epic were among the winners, with the inimitable Akin Babayagit scooping this year’s Mobile Legend.

PGC Helsinki, the central hub of Finnish Games Week, remains the biggest Nordic games industry gathering (hence its rebranding to PGC Nordics in 2026), and this year drew over 1,350 delegates from 580 companies to take part. Alongside the main conference we offered thre dedicated side summits for Big Screen Gaming, Transmedia (in association with Helsinki Film Lab) and AI: Game Changers. We also unveiled the latest edition of our annual Top 50 Game Makers list (spoilers – Whiteout Survival and Kingshot maker Century Games topped the table this year!) and launched the new Aurora Initiative, celebrating the amazing women of the Nordic games industry.

And STILL coming…

The Inaugural PGC Summit Korea, in association with local event specialists Opener and Zempie, saw us return to Asia and bring together some of the biggest names in the world’s 4th biggest market as well as the wider APAC region for one perfect day nestled alongside the KGDA conference and Contents Universe. Local giants lke NCSoft, Krafton, Com2uS connected with Garena, Electronic Arts, Tilting Point, Xsolla, Microsoft, and Wizards of the Coast among many others to share insights and discuss oppportunites in a dual-language setup before letting their hair down to continue chatting over chicken and beer!

Last, but certainly not least, PGC Aqaba, run in cahoots with the Jordan Gaming Lab and King Abdullah II Fund (KAFD), concluded the event tour with some winter sun and a truly unique event that united over 2,400 ecosystem delegates from across the fastest growing region in the industry. Our first ever open-air conference saw PGC take over a national monument (the Arab revolt plaza) to showcase incredible developers in the ID@Xbox zone, whilst running Big Indie Pitches and other fringe events in a neighbouring fort and hosting over 50 expert speakers in an amptheatre on the sea-front!
We also unveiled the latest iteration of our Top 30 MENA Game Makers and topped it all off with a truly memorable VIP trip to world wonder Petra and historic Wadi Rum (where only one CEO got kidnapped from a train).

As if this weren’t enough, we also ran five phenomenal supper clubs, rubbing shoulders and clinking glasses with the greatest and the goodest of the games industry across three continents, as well as some truly raucous industry parties, most notably in San Francisco and Cologne!

Hold the front page! 

In between the live events, the SM media teams kept the industry news flowing 24/7.
PocketGamer.Biz had a banner year, breaking traffic records, with users up 27% year on year (a total of 2.13M visitors to the site – averaging around 200K visitors p/month), views over 4.5M (c.400K p/month). Web3 sister site BlockchainGamer.Biz defied a crypto gaming downturn to grow it’s average monthly audience 28%, whilst PCGamesInsider.Biz ploughed a similar furrow for bigger screen gaming.

Meanwhile our consumer media channels, led by PocketGamer.Com, battled the relentless algorithmic winds to post over 1M annual increase in visitor numbers, raising the average to over 1.8M uniques per month and 7.5M monthly page views, whilst both its sister sites 148Apps.com and Appspy.com were sucessfully relaunched.

Both PG.Biz and PG.Com also relaunched their podcasts, as well as growing mailing lists, social and video channels – more to come on that in ’26!

Credit where it’s due…

As we take a final look back at the year just gone, and glance ahead to grander plans and an even busier event calendar in 2026, our 20th anniversary year, we want to take the opportunity to say some heartfelt thank you’s.

Firstly to all members of the Steel Media team, who’ve relentlessly risen to the challenge, I’m more than aware that the demands are high (and sometimes even seem unreasonable), but they always go the extra mile and give your all to reach the goal.

Secondly to ALL of our incredible sponsors and speakers – suffice to say without your support, these crazy ambitions would be simply impossible. 

Finally, to the global glorious games industry as a whole – those who attend our events, who read our stories or who don’t do either but just help to make the industry what it is.
This whole 20 year adventure is ultimately for you and about you. It’s our love letter to an industry that has been such a big part of all of our lives and given us so much. 

We remain very much in your debt* and shall continue to serve, starting once more with PGC London 2026 in January, which looks set once again to be our biggest show ever.

* No that doesn’t mean you can all have free tickets, although you can get a 10% discount on tickets using promo code ‘BIZHAPPYHOLIDAYS’ at checkout until at least January 2nd.