The hobby games market grew 40% to $3.66 billion in 2025 according to ICv2 estimates, with strong consumer demand overcoming the impacts of major disruptions, including tariffs and a distributor bankruptcy.
The fall and holiday season finished off a strong year, with growth that accelerated from the spring and summer seasons behind a strong release schedule across categories. That strong release schedule was one contributor to a very heavy product flow through distribution; the other was larger-than-normal restock orders from retailers, many of whom had brought in lower inventory levels for the 2025 holiday season, anticipating reduced demand due to inflation and other tariff-related issues.
Despite the ability of the market to overcome the disruptions, that’s not to say the disruptions were minor. The big hikes in import taxes that began in April 2025 slowed product flow for a time, especially in the board game and miniatures categories, as publishers delayed manufacturing and shipments of imported products to the U.S. while they decided whether to raise prices, change their product mix, change their sourcing, or just absorb the new taxes.
The bankruptcy of Diamond Comic Distributors and subsidiaries Diamond Book Distributors and Alliance Game Distributors disrupted product flow to Alliance and is still causing problems for game publishers that used Diamond Book Distributors as their distributor to the book trade. Consignment inventory held by DBD is currently the subject of litigation; the bankruptcy estate is seeking to seize and sell the inventory (see “Diamond Bankruptcy Trustee Appealing).
Categories
While sales in three of our four hobby game categories were flat or showed modest growth, TCGs were up dramatically, despite already retaining much of the growth the category experienced during the Covid pandemic. The differences in growth rates brought TCGs to a new high in share of the business; TCGs now account for roughly 2/3 of hobby games dollars.
Channels
It was a great year in the hobby channel, with sales up nearly one-third in the 17th consecutive year of growth. The store count in the channel was definitely up, although it was difficult to tell how much because of shifting shares between distributors.
Crowdfunding
Although we’re no longer including crowdfunding dollars in our estimates of market size (see below), we do have some general observations.
On Kickstarter, which is still the largest crowdfunding platform for games despite losing share to Gamefound and BackerKit, the number of projects was up, but the overall dollars were down in 2025, according to an analysis by BoardGameGeek.
It was our observation that publishers were using crowdfunding to cut risk in the face of erratic tariff policy; it allowed them to sell at full retail, giving them more margin to offset changes in costs that selling at wholesale prices to the trade.
Methodology
For our market size estimates, we get information from interviews with publishers, distributors, retailers, and others; from information released by publicly trade companies, and from broad information released publicly by Circana. We build up our estimates by category into the totals reported in these articles.
We made two changes in methodology for our reporting on 2025. First, we removed crowdfunding from our market size estimates for 2025, and to make number comparable, also removed crowdfunding dollars from our estimates for previous years for comparison purposes. We made the change because Kickstarter is no longer reporting category-specific numbers; because there are now multiple platforms where crowdfunding occurs, and the other platforms have never reported annual information; and because it’s become increasingly difficult to identify the domestic portion of Kickstarter totals.
Second, we are now combining board and card games for our market size estimates, although we are still doing separate charts of top games in both sub-categories.
For the in-depth version of this article, see “In Depth: Big Growth in Hobby Games”).
Information in this article was first reported in a presentation of the ICv2 White Paper by Mitlon Griepp at GAMA Expo 2026 (see “ICv2 White Paper Audio and Deck”).
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Source: ICv2
