Did these five games and music predictions come true in 2025?
In 2024, video games and music strategist and consultant Mat Ombler logged just over 1,550 stories highlighting the continued growth of the video game industry's music section, including music games, soundtrack releases and composer interviews.
In a LinkedIn post from January this year, Ombler noted a growing interest from music companies, mainly through strategic investments, synch deals, partnerships, in-game events and virtual concerts.
Along with Eric Tan, owner of creative agency Sway and former head of music (APEC) at Riot Games, and Kenny Vaughan, director of new business and music supervisor at Feel for Music, the trio made their predictions and insight for the year ahead.
Ahead of his upcoming appearance as an expert speaker at Beyond Games: Transmedia Summit as part of Pocket Gamer Connects London on January 19th and 20th, Ombler recently shared an update saying that he felt they, "Were pretty much spot on with our predictions for music and gaming trends in 2025". So what were they?
Persistent music experiences in Roblox are dying - music companies will focus on integrations rather than building owned activations.
Yup! The three major Roblox experiences from the majors are now digital graveyards and the focus on activations in Roblox and Fortnite has been on integrating music and assets rather than creating something new.
“Barriers for entry into Fortnite have dropped with the launch of Fortnite Creative.”Mat Ombler
Why? Owned activations on UGC platforms require maintenance and updates to sustain DAU in the same way as any live-service game. Labels and music companies are not game developers (at least, not yet…).
The music industry will land a big hit in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN).
Sony Music has been leading the way here with their activations via Sony Immersive Music Studios. A Sleepy Hallow concert in April reached 16.3k concurrent players – a significant jump compared to earlier activations – but the major triumph was when a concert for PartyNextDoor in UEFN experience hit 500k players.
Barriers for entry into Fortnite have dropped with the launch of Fortnite Creative as artists no longer need to rely on official support from Epic Games to do activations (although that support will always help with numbers!)
The success of Epic Games and Riot Games will encourage other game publishers to ramp up their music strategies.
I’m going to share more info on this next year but I’ve tracked more music and gaming activations/collaborations this year than any other year to date.
One of the biggest areas of growth has been anthems – where game studios collaborate with major artists to write original songs for game marketing beats and content updates (AKA the Riot Games WORLDS anthem model). Final Fantasy XIV’s collaboration with Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) and Beartooth is a great recent example of this.
The next game to do Fortnite-style numbers for a music activation could be a mobile game.
50/50 on this! It’s been a weird year for mobile as I’ve noticed a drop in DAU for the major players (PUBG, Free Fire) and there haven’t been any major live service new releases. I still think this will happen in the future.
If GTA VI launches in 2025, it will change the music and gaming space forever.
It will, but it didn’t – and the jury’s still out on whether it will launch in 2026!
Beyond Games
Join Mat Ombler at the Beyond Games: Transmedia Summit on January 20th – as part of Pocket Gamer Connects London – for an intimate discussion around the trends in music and games. Topics will include what works (and doesn’t) in licensing and partnerships, examples of best-in-class music game integrations, trends across VR, Roblox, Fortnite and PC Gaming, as well as what’s ahead in the years to come. Register for your tickets here.
This article was first published on BeyondGames.biz.
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