Gaming's next winners will be built on player focus, AI-powered personalization, and direct relationships, Bain & Co report finds

• The most active players make up nearly 60% of all time played, while the highest-spending group accounts for 75% of total spending
  
  
• AI can speed up game development, but it won't save an unfocused game; without a clear target player, it scales wrong bets faster
  
  
• Nearly half of gamers have bypassed app stores to buy directly from developers in the past year, and personalized offers are more effective than generic discounts  

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The average gamer no longer exists: an effectively unlimited game catalog has fragmented player preferences, while playing time and spending have become heavily concentrated among a narrow, identifiable set of players, making chasing the average player the costliest mistake in the industry today. These are the key findings of Bain & Company's 2026 Gaming Report, which draws on a survey of more than 5,300 gamers across the world, as well as Bain's proprietary analysis of 100 titles released since 2023.

In its third edition, the report follows from last year's observation of a growing direct-to-consumer trend that has culminated to nearly half of gamers buying direct today. "The question for gaming executives is no longer solely about reaching more players. It's reaching the right players, in the right way, and getting more ownership over that relationship," said Anders Christofferson, partner of Bain's Media & Entertainment practice and global head of Bain's Video Game sector. "The studios pulling ahead are the ones that have made a deliberate choice about who they are building for and are aligning every resource behind that answer; AI, distribution, and personalization alike."

End of the average gamer: preferences are broadening, yet spending concentrates -

Surveyed gamers are split across the gaming experiences they want most. No single experience type attracted more than 26% of respondents. The divergence is more obvious when comparing across age cohorts: a third of 13-to-17-year-olds want open, user-generated content, a share that collapses to 15% or lower among players aged 50 and older.

Spending follows a similarly uneven pattern. Twenty percent of the highest-spending players account for nearly three-quarters of total spending, but the most active 20% of players account for almost 60% of all playing time. Demographics play a significant role as the willingness to spend declines with age. The report finds that 86% of teenage gamers spend money on gaming each month, compared to only 36% of players in their 60s and 27% in their 70s. Additionally, those who create game content for public use are twice as likely to spend money, Bain's survey finds.

Targeting specific players drives commercial success, and AI can accelerate the process

Bain's analysis found that 83% of games built around a specific, identifiable player achieved commercial success, compared with 50% of games that were not. Two-thirds of gamers want more of what they already play (a franchise sequel, a similar, or a focus on already existing content). Only one in five players is looking for something genuinely different. For a studio with a clear target player, AI tools offer faster prototyping, cheaper iteration, and deeper audience understanding, at a time when 42% of gamers are more comfortable with AI in games than a year ago, rising to 59% among teens aged 13 to 17.

"AI is changing the cost structure of game development, but it doesn't change the fundamental question every studio has to answer first: who exactly are you building for? Without that answer, AI doesn't lower your risk, it lets you scale the wrong bet faster," said Anders Videbaek, partner at Bain & Company's Media & Entertainment practice and leader of the firm's Video Game sector in EMEA. "The developers pulling ahead are committing to a target player earlier than their competitors, and using AI to deepen that focus, not broaden it."

Next growth lever is deeper player relationships; not bigger audiences

As overall market expansion moderates, Bain's report argues that strengthening relationships with existing players has become the priority of this era. Gaming companies that have built direct relationships with their players are sitting on rich behavioral data (in-game micro-decisions, social graph connections, purchase histories) that most have barely begun to use. Most gamers feel comfortable or neutral toward personalized offers based on their in-game activity, meaning the companies that move first to build the personalization infrastructure will gain a durable advantage that will be difficult for competitors to replicate.

True one-to-one personalization, where every interaction is optimized in real time for the individual player, is made possible by contextual bandit engines, a class of machine learning models that enable agents to learn continuously from player behavior and optimize decisions in real time. Bain outlines five areas where this could unlock value: in-game store and offer optimization, lapsed player reengagement, personalized onboarding, in-game content discovery, and cross-title recommendations within a portfolio.

Half of gamers are already buying direct – personalized offers make them more likely to buy

In a development that may have caught many gaming executives off guard, nearly half of surveyed gamers purchased virtual currency, items, or in-game content directly from a developer's web store in the past 12 months. Twenty-seven percent have done so multiple times. Among 13-to-17-year-olds, the cohort that will define the market over the next decade; 40% have made multiple direct purchases in the past year. And the shift is already happening on scale.

The platform economics has shifted accordingly. For the first time, the base fees charged by major distribution platforms are falling as structural and regulatory pressure reshape distribution. But publishers moved before the platforms did. Three-quarters of top-grossing mobile games worldwide now operate their own web store, up from just 12% in 2019, according to Bain's analysis. For mobile publishers without a direct-to-consumer strategy, the margin of opportunity is considerable: each sale converted from a third-party platform to a direct channel improves margin by 15 to 30 percentage points.

However, Bain argues that the bigger prize is the player relationship itself – the behavioral data, the conversion leverage, and the ability to deliver personalized offers that move purchasing behavior far more than blanket discounts. Bain's report shows increasing the size of discounts for a web-store purchase from 10% to 30% barely moved the share of gamers who preferred a direct purchase over buying through an app store. By contrast, among gamers who have made multiple direct purchases in the past 12 months, 84% said a personalized offer from a game they play often would make them more likely to buy.

For gaming executives, the report's direction is clear: know your player, build for them specifically, and own the relationship directly. Those that do will define the next era of the industry.

Media contacts:
Ann Lee (Singapore) — [email protected]
Gary Duncan (London) — [email protected]
Dan Pinkney (Boston) — [email protected]

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SOURCE Bain & Company