The digital economy increasingly runs on whoever can keep you on-screen the longest, because attention translates into ad revenue and monetization opportunities. Games industry analyst Matthew Ball argues videogames are getting a smaller slice of that economy – less attention and less money – and in several major markets, time spent gaming is trending down.
PC Gamer points to an early access release of Ball’s 2025 games-industry trends report. Ball highlights eight countries – the United States, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and Italy – which together accounted for more than 60% of consumer spending prior to the Covid pandemic. He refers to them as the “Mature Market 8”, and says they’ve run into a “severe, persistent, and surprising” reality: they’re starting to lose the war for attention.
In four of those eight countries, surveys show fewer people now describe themselves as regular videogame players than they did before the peak of Covid lockdowns. In the US, Ball says data from Circana, the ESA, Ampere, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that “the share of the population that plays games has fallen by 2.5-4 points since before the pandemic”. In Canada, Ball notes that even lockdowns didn’t sustain player numbers: while polling is irregular, he says the last report from the Canadian trade association showed roughly one in six adult players were “lost” from 2018 to 2022 despite the lockdowns.
In South Korea, Ball says the number of self-reported gamers is down 15% compared to the 2017-2019 average, while in Italy the number of videogame-playing adults has fallen by more than 5% since 2019. The UK is a bit different: participation is higher than it was pre-pandemic because it spiked by a massive 21% in 2020, but Ball says that gain has been steadily eroding, already losing about a third of that increase in the years that followed.
France, Germany, and Japan buck the trend – at least on participation. Ball says France has held roughly steady since 2016 at around 52% of the population reporting that they play videogames, and Germany’s participation is up 4% compared to 2019. Japan is the biggest outlier: Ball says the number of Japanese people who regularly play videogames has grown by 11% since 2019, though he adds that the country’s “modest (and shrinking) population” means that amounts to only 6 million new players since 2019. Even where participation has increased, Ball notes that combined PC and console consumer spending across these eight markets has either flatlined or fallen over the last four years.
Ball describes a shrinking global gaming population as “a compounding problem”. As the number of players shrinks, the burden of the industry’s revenue demands lands on the remaining players, and growth – the focus of every stakeholder – “can only come from greater monetization of (ever fewer) remaining players”. If fewer new players are entering, games can only expand audiences by pulling players away from competitors, which makes it harder for new games to succeed. The games that survive, Ball says, can end up offering a gradually impaired experience as their player bases dwindle and monetization pressures intensify, further worsening the cycle.
The author adds an anecdotal note: while still playing plenty, games are taking up less of his free time, in large part because so many of them work relentlessly to monopolize attention and drain wallets. Ball’s data suggests the recent decline in player counts coincides with growth in other “novel forms” of interactive pastimes. In the US, Ball says people now watch over 50 million more hours of TikTok than they did in 2020. Spending on OnlyFans has more than doubled over the same period. Since 2023, quarterly installs of consumer AI apps have risen from 100 million to almost 1 billion. Prediction markets, sports betting, and crypto investing are also up.
Ball also argues the overlap is structural: among American adults, men aged 18-35 are both up to two times as likely to play videogames and “up to 3.6 times as likely to use short-form video, OnlyFans, AI, and prediction markets”. And each of those services, he says, is heavily invested in subjecting users to “a barrage of new, interruptive, and irresistible notifications” designed to keep them engaged.
Ball’s bottom line, as summarized by PC Gamer, isn’t necessarily that games have become worse at holding attention. It’s that an attention economy is hitting from every direction, trying to dominate time and focus before games even get a chance.
Source: PC Gamer
