Gamers are playing less: because of this, publishers are becoming greedier and greedier.

The global gaming industry is facing a persistent decline in the amount of time users dedicate to video games. This has affected the largest markets—the United States, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and Italy—which before the pandemic accounted for over 60% of global gaming expenditures.

In half of these countries, the share of citizens who play regularly is now lower than before the pandemic. In the US, the figure has decreased by 2.5–4 percentage points, while in South Korea, the number of gamers has dropped by 15%. Even where the audience has grown, spending on PC and console games is stagnating.

Analyst Matthew Ball calls this a "cumulative problem": the shrinking audience forces the industry to intensify monetization or compete for users with rivals. Meanwhile, people's attention is being pulled away by short videos, streaming services, AI applications, and betting. Games haven't gotten worse at retaining audiences; it's just that the battle for attention is fiercer than ever.