EU Games Industry Hit €24bn Revenue in 2024 with 6,600 Studios

A Continent Still Growing, Sort Of

The European games industry closed out 2024 with €24 billion in combined turnover, more than 6,600 active studios, and a workforce topping 95,000 people. Those figures come from the European Video Game Industry Insights Report, jointly published by the European Games Development Association (EGDF) and Video Games Europe.

The studio count rose by somewhere between 5% and 10% compared to the prior year, which is a meaningful jump. Employment, however, is a more complicated story. Growth in the continent’s talent base effectively stalled, and the EGDF acknowledged in the report that layoffs, consolidations, and declining headcounts in certain markets produced what the organization described as “the first such dip in the sector for the first time.”

That tension, studios multiplying while overall hiring flatlines, captures the strange mood that has defined the global games industry for the past couple of years. More teams exist than before, but the people filling them are spread thinner, or in some cases just gone.

Poland and Cyprus Lead in Unexpected Ways

Poland stands out as the EU’s biggest employer in game development and publishing, and it also topped the chart for new titles released, putting out 450 games in 2024. Countries including Finland, Italy, and Czechia saw modest employment growth, offering some counterweight to the regions that contracted.

Two new additions to the report add fresh texture. Bulgaria and Cyprus appeared in the European data for the first time in the 2024 edition. Cyprus, perhaps surprisingly, was described as the “main game industry hub in terms of combined revenue,” posting €4.3 billion in turnover on its own. Bulgaria was recognized as an “important regional hub” drawing on talent from neighboring Romania and Türkiye.

Those are not names that typically dominate conversations about European game development, which is part of what makes their inclusion interesting. The industry’s geographic footprint in Europe is wider than the traditional clusters in Stockholm, Helsinki, or Warsaw might suggest.

UK Numbers and Report Methodology

The report also captured data from the United Kingdom, where the workforce reached 28,516. That figure sits outside the EU totals given the UK’s post-Brexit status, but the EGDF included it as part of the broader European picture.

It is worth understanding how the data gets assembled. The 28 EGDF member organizations each produce individual national reports, which are then consolidated. That compilation process is why the 2024 report, released in August 2026, reflects numbers from two years ago rather than something more recent. The methodology is thorough, but the lag is real.

“The report demonstrates that despite challenging times, industry growth continued in several countries, in both revenue and the number of studios, lifting both indicators at the European level,” the EGDF wrote in the report. The organization did not soften the harder finding: employment stagnation is new territory for the sector, even if revenues held up.

What the Numbers Actually Mean

The €24 billion figure and the studio growth are genuine positives. More development companies operating across the continent means more diversity in who is making games and where. The employment picture complicates that optimism without canceling it. A sector can expand in headcount of organizations while individual studios run leaner, especially after two years of high-profile cuts that swept through teams of all sizes.

The inclusion of Cyprus and Bulgaria also hints at a broader reshaping of where European development capacity lives. If a single country can generate €4.3 billion in industry revenue and barely registered on the radar before this report, there are probably other pockets of the European map that the industry has not fully mapped yet.