At least 120 Polish studios counted as active in 2023 have since closed, halted operations or stopped making games — roughly one in four studios in two years, according to The Game Industry of Poland – Report 2025, published by the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development (PARP). The research, led by Jakub Marszałkowski of Indie Games Poland with data collected by the Game Industry Conference, puts the number of active studios and publishers at 824 as of October 2025.

Employment fell from 15,290 to 14,568 people. Women make up 24.5% of the workforce, and 2,020 employees — almost 15% — are foreigners. PARP notes that foreign-owned studios keep expanding in Poland: Larian and Activision both opened Warsaw offices in the last two years.

How bad is the revenue picture?

Polish developers and publishers earned PLN 5.52 billion (€1.293 billion) in 2024, down 8% year over year. The 2022 peak stood at PLN 6.48 billion. Large companies swing hard with release cycles: Techland's revenue collapsed 80% in 2023, from PLN 1.12 billion to PLN 229 million, following the record year driven by Dying Light 2. Strip out the biggest studios and the rest of the industry stagnated in 2023 and declined in 2024. Fewer than a third of Polish studios earn meaningful revenue regularly; most have yet to ship their first commercial release.

By headcount, Poland shares 2nd–3rd place in Europe with France (12,000–15,000 people). The UK leads at 25,419 people across 1,757 companies; Germany is fourth with 12,408. PARP cautions that the comparison uses 2025 data for Poland and older figures for the other countries.

What changed for studios and funding?

Marszałkowski points to funding as the main cause of the downturn. After years of growth above 20% annually, investors have turned cautious, publishers have pulled out, and access to capital has been missing for the third year in a row. The crisis among international publishers hit Poland through payment delays, budget cuts and project cancellations — and Polish studios are shipping games too early because development money runs out.

All state support programs for games in Poland ended in December 2023. The only survivor is a small video game program at the Creative Industries Institute. Germany, by comparison, runs a support program worth €125 million a year.

Adrian Jabłonka of Madnetic Games describes industry-wide budget cuts: small studios lack resources to hire and train newcomers, and some experienced specialists are leaving game development. Madnetic Games has moved to smaller projects with the goal of finishing what it has already started. Competition compounds the pressure — almost 20,000 games ship on Steam every year, and even a good project struggles to reach players.

What do platforms and public markets show?

• 71.8% of Polish studios name PC as their main platform; mobile accounts for 11.5%, Nintendo Switch 4.6%, PlayStation 3.8%.
• The share of studios focused primarily on VR/AR more than halved, to 3.1%.
• 69% of studios make premium games, 18.6% work in outsourcing, 12.4% build F2P titles.
• 46 publishers in Poland released games globally in 2024, up from 13 in 2016; the count has held between 45 and 47 since 2021.

Polish studios release more than 450 games per year, with a slight recent decline driven by mobile and VR. Since 2014, 41 games from Polish developers have sold more than a million copies; 15 new IPs joined that club since the previous report, and only a quarter are AAA projects.

On Steam's most-anticipated Top 200, Poland led by wishlists in 2021 with 38 games. In July 2025, 12 Polish games made the list (6.12%), ranking the country 7th behind the US (33.25 games), Canada (17.25) and Japan (15). PARP partly attributes this to large studios working on unannounced projects, but the report's authors cite the end of support programs as the main reason. Germany improved its ranking position by 466% since 2021.

The public market looks equally strained. In 2025, 24 game companies traded on the Warsaw Stock Exchange's main market and 71 on NewConnect. Median revenue for main-market companies is €6.8 million. On NewConnect, 5 companies have had operations suspended, 6 have had no meaningful revenue for a long time, and 13 more earned under €250 thousand last fiscal year. Marszałkowski believes the stock exchange has become more of a burden: companies spend significant resources on it and get almost nothing in return.

Are there bright spots?

Big companies are performing. CD Projekt earned PLN 867 million in 2025 with a net profit of PLN 595 million; The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has passed 65 million copies sold, and Cyberpunk 2077 with Phantom Liberty keeps selling. 11 bit studios posted record revenue of PLN 141 million, with operating profit of PLN 21.9 million and net profit of PLN 6.94 million. Bloober Team's Silent Hill 2 has sold more than 2 million copies, and in June 2026 the studio reported that Cronos: The New Dawn revenue exceeded its development costs.

With 97% of Polish games' revenue earned abroad, the sector's fate stays tied to foreign publishers and capital. Watch the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, which promised in early 2026 to begin work on a games industry development strategy — the first policy response since state support ended.