Increasingly, our digital economies are defined by a contest to capture our attention. A product, service, or platform can get us to keep it on-screen, that’s a gateway to lucrative advertising revenue and monetization opportunities. We’re paying with our attention as much as our money—and according to games industry analyst Matthew Ball, we’re giving less of both to videogames.
According to an early access release of Ball’s report on games industry trends in 2025, eight countries—the US, Japan, South Korea, the UK, Germany, France, Canada, and Italy—accounted for over 60% of consumer spending prior to the COVID pandemic. But in the years since, Ball says “the ‘Mature Market 8’ have encountered a severe, persistent, and surprising reality: They are losing in the War for Attention.”
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In half of those countries, surveys show that the number of people who describe themselves as regularly playing videogames is lower today than it was before the height of COVID lockdowns. In the US, data from Circana, the ESA, Ampere, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that “the share of the population that plays games has fallen by 2.5-4 points since before the pandemic,” Ball says.
In Canada, even pandemic lockdowns didn’t sustain player numbers; “though irregularly polled,” Ball says, “the Canadian trade association’s last report showed that roughly one in six adult players were lost from 2018 to 2022 despite the lockdowns.” In South Korea, the number of self-reported gamers is down 15% compared to the 2017-2019 average, while the number of videogame-playing adults in Italy has fallen over 5% since 2019.
While the videogame-playing percentage of the UK’s population is higher than it was pre-pandemic, having jumped a massive 21% in 2020, that gain has steadily declined—already losing a third of that increase in the following years.
France, Germany, and Japan buck the trend. Since 2016, France has maintained around 52% of the population reporting as playing videogames, while Germany’s videogaming participation is actually up 4% compared to 2019. Japan’s the biggest outlier: Since 2019, the number of Japanese people who regularly play videogames has grown by 11%—though Ball says the country’s “modest (and shrinking) population means only 6 million new players since 2019.”
But even in those countries where gaming participation has increased, the industry’s combined PC and console consumer spending has either flatlined or fallen over the last four years.
Ball says a shrinking global gaming population is “a compounding problem.” As the number of people playing games shrinks, it’s the remaining players who have to bear the burden of the industry’s revenue demands. As a result, growth—the singular focus of every industry shareholder—”can only come from greater monetization of (ever fewer) remaining players.”
Meanwhile, if the number of new players is falling, games can only grow their audience by pulling players away from their competition. It’s harder for new games to succeed, and the games that survive—Ball says—offer a gradually impaired experience as their player bases dwindle and their monetization pressures intensify, further exacerbating the problem.
Anecdotally, my own experience seems to align with Ball’s logic. While I’m still playing plenty, games are definitely occupying less of my free time—in large part because of how relentlessly so many of them are working to monopolize my attention and empty my wallet.
According to Ball’s data, the recent decline in the numbers of people playing games coincides with growth in other “novel forms” of interactive pastimes. The US, for example, watches over 50 million more hours of TikTok today than it did in 2020. Spending on OnlyFans has more than doubled over the same period. Since 2023, quarterly installs of consumer AI apps have increased from 100 million to almost 1 billion. Prediction markets, sports betting, crypto investing—all up.
And as Ball notes, the same group is overrepresented amongst both gamers and users of those “new interactive substitutes”: Of 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 is deeply invested in subjecting their users to “a barrage of new, interruptive, and irresistible notifications for these substitutes.”
The problem that the games industry faces, Ball concludes, isn’t necessarily that its ability to hold player attention has gotten worse. It’s that we’re assailed on all sides by an economy working to dominate our attention before games get the chance.
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