Gaming Report 2026

Gaming Report 2026
Choose Your Player

Acknowledgments
The leadership team of Bain & Company’s Global Gaming Sector practice prepared this report,
with special direction from Anders Christofferson, partner and Global Gaming Sector lead,
and Brandon Rogers, Media practice manager.
The authors would like to thank Danielle Schwenker, Aman Sharma, Gunjan Dawar, Shray Arora,
Rohan Doomra, Shagun Jain, and Christoffer Karlsmose for their contributions to this work.
Thanks also to Heather Clayberg, Jeff Bauter Engel, and the editorial team for their assistance.
Copyright 2026 Bain & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Gaming Report 2026
Contents
Choose Your Player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Gamer Survey: The End of the Average Gamer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
AI Won’t Save an Unfocused Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Gaming’s Personalization Imperative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Game Distribution: Half Your Players Already Buy Direct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

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Choose Your Player
The easily defined gamer no longer exists. Gaming has become more global, social, and diverse, which
makes chasing the average player the costliest mistake in the industry. Playing time and spending have
become heavily concentrated. But this valuable core of the market isn’t one audience: Preferences
vary widely across age and every other dimension we tested. The race is on to win the core.
A game built for everyone is now the risky bet. AI won’t rescue these games—it scales the wrong bets
as fast as the right ones. The advantage goes to companies that own the relationship with their chosen
players, understanding each one well enough to personalize what they offer and, increasingly, selling
to them directly. Nearly half of players already buy straight from developers, bypassing the app stores.
The next market leaders won’t necessarily win the most players. They’ll win the right ones.
Gaming Report 2026
Daniel Hong
Leader of Bain’s Global
Media & Entertainment practice
Anders Christofferson
Global Gaming Sector Lead
Anders Videbaek
Gaming Sector Lead, Europe,
the Middle East, and Africa
Tom Rowland
Gaming Sector Lead,
Americas

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At a Glance
Today’s players can choose from a practically unlimited games catalog, and their preferences
are diverging .
No single “ideal” gaming experience wins more than a quarter of gamers, according
to Bain’s latest annual survey .
Our survey found that spending concentrates among a narrow, identifiable set of players,
particularly young content creators .
For studios, the math has flipped: The broad middle of the market has become the costly
place to aim .
A decade ago, a player’s choice of games was bound by what a handful of platforms could stock and what
a few dozen studios could ship. That ceiling has been torn off. Tens of thousands of new titles reach
digital storefronts every year from indies through AAA studios. Live-service games captivate players
for years rather than weeks. User-generated platforms turn every player into a potential supplier, their
content creation now turbocharged by AI.
Gamer Survey: The End
of the Average Gamer
Supply is exploding as demand fractures. The advantage now belongs to companies
that pick a lane and serve it well.
By Anders Videbaek and Benjamin Sommer

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Source: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)
Figure 1: Gamers’ preferences are split, with no single gaming experience
standing out
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Gaming Report 2026
The game shelf has become effectively infinite, and choices are multiplying faster than any player’s
attention can grow. When supply is scarce, a broadly appealing product can win. When supply is basically
unlimited, personal fit is everything. That’s the new reality, and it explains why “there is no average
gamer” has become a board-level strategic issue.
The demand is there to capture. Three out of four gamers are actively hunting for their next title,
according to Bain & Company’s latest annual survey of more than 5,300 gamers worldwide. Most are
looking in categories they already love, not seeking something unfamiliar. The losing move in 2026 is
trying to serve all of them. The question every gaming CEO should be asking themselves has morphed
from “How do we reach more players?” to “Which players do we choose, how do we best engage them,
and how do we own the relationship completely?”
When supply is basically unlimited, personal fit is everything.
Demand has fragmented
When we asked gamers to describe the experience they want most, the field split five ways. No single
experience type surpassed 26% ( see Figure 1 ).
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Figure 2: Gamers’ preference for “open sandbox” or user-generated content
experiences declines sharply with age and varies widely across markets
Gaming Report 2026
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Source: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)
The top-line split is the mild version of the story. The sharp divergence shows up when comparing
different cohorts. For example, a third of 13-to-17-year-olds have an appetite for open, user-generated
worlds; that share collapses to 15% or lower among players 50 and older. Preferences diverge widely
by geography as well ( see Figure 2 ).
Spending has concentrated
As demand has fragmented, playing time and spending have become heavily concentrated. The most
active players account for almost 60% of all gamers’ total playing time, and the highest-spending group
accounts for about three-quarters of total spending, according to our survey ( see Figure 3 ).
Player fragmentation reads as bad news until you look at where the spending concentrates: among
an identifiable, deeply engaged chunk of the market.
Although not the only identifier, demographics are a critical one. The willingness to spend declines with
age, according to our survey. Approximately 86% of teenagers spend money on gaming-related activities
in a typical month, compared with just over half of players in their 50s, 36% of those in their 60s, and 27%
of those in their 70s ( see Figure 4 ).
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Figure 3: Gamers’ playing time and spending are heavily concentrated
Gaming Report 2026
Notes: Most engaged defined as the 20% of gamers who spend the most hours playing, moderately engaged includes the 50th to 80th percentile of gamers ranked by hours spent playing, and least engaged includes the rest; top spenders defined as the highest 20% of spenders, middle includes the 50th to 80th percentile of spenders, and bottom includes the rest; values are roundedSource: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)
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Notes: Excludes those who answered “I do not spend any amount” or “I do not know”; gaming-related activities include purchasing new games, in-game content, subscriptions, and streamer tips; excludes purchasing hardware such as consoles or virtual reality headsetsSource: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)
Figure 4: Younger players are more willing to spend money on gaming activities
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Gaming Report 2026
The high-spending players are even more recognizable by behavior. Those who create game content
for public use are twice as likely to spend money, our survey found.
Together, splintering demand and concentrated spending flip the math for studios. Designing mass-
appeal games is no longer a safe bet, in part because those titles reach the low spenders first.
The harder target is where the growth is: players who spend more and are more engaged.
Implications for gaming executives
The average gamer was always a convenient fiction. In 2026, it’s an expensive one. Adapting your strategy
to the changing landscape starts with two things.
Size the market by fragment, not by average. No single number describes this market, and the mean
sits between players who want opposite things. The winning companies will size demand by the
characteristics that actually split it (age, geography, taste, spending tier, creative identity), understanding
players by what they do, not just who they are.
Aim where spending is growing. Headcount and spending have decoupled. The broadest cohorts spend
the least, while a narrower, identifiable set spends more.
This chapter explains how to start identifying those players. Committing to the target player—focusing
the portfolio and the capital behind that choice—is where the report goes next.

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At a Glance
Many of the industry’s highest-profile failures have one thing in common: They tried to be
everything to everyone .
Two-thirds of gamers want more of the same; only about 20% want something new .
Unfocused games satisfy none of them .
AI is an accelerant, not a rescue . For studios without a clear target player, it scales bad
bets faster .
Successful studios will kill unfocused projects, rebuild on an AI-reset cost base, and invest
in the core player .
Scroll through any gaming industry newsletter from the past two years, and a pattern emerges:
Another high-profile title stumbles, another postmortem asks what went wrong. The names change,
but the diagnosis rarely does. These misses weren’t a result of creative mistakes or bad luck. They were
expensive games built without a clear answer to a basic question: Who, exactly, is this for?
That question has always mattered. What’s changed is the cost of getting it wrong.
Gaming is a creative industry, which means swings and misses come with the territory. But these days,
the biggest misses are the games that tried to be everything to everyone.
AI Won’t Save an Unfocused Game
In a saturated market, AI rewards studios that have a clear target gamer and quickly
compounds the losses of those that don’t.
By Tom Rowland and Anders Videbaek

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Gaming Report 2026
For years, spreading bets looked like prudent diversification. Two converging pressures have since turned
the unfocused game into one of the most expensive lines on the balance sheet.
The first is demand. This report’s previous chapter showed that the average gamer no longer exists. Game
supply is effectively unlimited, tastes have split into factions that want opposite things, and spending has
pooled in a narrow, identifiable set of players.
Skyrocketing supply hasn’t scattered players—it has concentrated them. Gamers, especially younger ones,
now spend their time on a much narrower set of games than in the past. The most popular live-service,
platform-style games, particularly Roblox , have become the center of gravity for the entire gaming
ecosystem over the past five years.
Players’ preferences for their next purchase confirm how habits have hardened, making the unfocused
game a risky bet. According to Bain’s 2026 survey of more than 5,300 gamers worldwide, two-thirds want
more of what they already have: a sequel to a franchise they love, a game much like their current favorites,
or no new game at all. Only one player in five is after something genuinely different ( see Figure 1 ).
No one is satisfied by the game in the unfocused middle: too generic to deliver the depth the majority
want, too safe to provide the novelty others chase, too shallow to pull time back from the giants.
Figure 1: Two-thirds of gamers want more of the same, while only 21% are
seeking new games that are genuinely different
Source: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)

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Gaming Report 2026
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The second pressure on unfocused games is AI, and the prevailing instinct here is exactly wrong. The
natural assumption is that cheaper production should make the mid-budget game viable again—lower
the cost base, lower the stakes, unlock more bets. The opposite is closer to the truth. AI is an accelerant,
not a rescue. Without a clear target player, it doesn’t lower your risk; it lets you scale the wrong bet faster.
All of this is forcing a reckoning. The developers that come out ahead over the next several years won’t
be the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated AI capabilities. They’ll be the ones that
commit—earlier than their competitors—to building for a player they can describe in a single sentence.
AI is an accelerant, not a rescue. Without a clear target player,
it doesn’t lower your risk; it lets you scale the wrong bet faster.
Focus or fail
The industry generates plenty of coverage about unfocused, trend-chasing titles that missed, but it’s
harder to gauge how systemic the pattern truly is. To get a rough read, Bain scanned publicly available
data on 100 titles released since 2023. Classifying games as focused or unfocused required judgment
calls, and data on commercial failures is far less accessible than data on successes. Even with those
caveats, the analysis points in the same direction as the thesis: 83% of focused games in our sample
achieved commercial success, compared with 50% of unfocused ones.
Consider Baldur’s Gate 3 and Concord , two bets placed around the same time, at comparable scale.
The first game’s developers built it for a highly specific target: the deep-lore, long-session, role-playing
gamer who had grown up on the Baldur’s Gate and Divinity series. They delivered something that
community had waited for years to arrive. The game was a smash hit, reportedly selling more than 20
million copies and generating $657 million on Steam in 2023, by far the platform’s best seller that year.
Meanwhile, Concord shipped into a crowded hero-shooter market and had trouble convincing players
already invested in free-to-play games such as Overwatch or Valorant to make the $40 purchase.
Some studios have caught themselves before the mistake compounds, shelving games when it became
clear that the players weren’t going to come—even if that realization came late in development. Canceling
a game that far along is a significant sunk cost. Shipping it would have been more painful.
Jagex demonstrates how narrowing focus on core players can strengthen the business. In recent years, the
UK-based studio behind RuneScape has divested some acquired studios, streamlined its project slate in part
due to player feedback, and rebranded itself “Jagex: The RuneScape Company.” Responding to community
feedback on its flagship game, the company also removed RuneScape ’s Treasure Hunter microtransactions
system. Jagex has since reported strong player numbers for both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape ,
as well as more than 1 million sales in the first year of its latest offshoot, RuneScape: Dragonwilds.

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Gaming Report 2026
Note: Values are roundedSource: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)
Figure 2: Comfort with AI in games has increased or held steady for most,
with teens feeling the most comfortable
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AI accelerates everything, including scaling bad bets
As AI resets game developers’ cost base, focus dictates who the reset rewards. A studio that knows who
it builds for can reinvest freed margin into depth its target audience will pay for. AI’s benefits compound
with focus; the clearer the target, the more precisely these tools can be aimed. Studios that don’t narrow
their focus have simply made the wrong bet cheaper to place—and faster to lose.
For a studio that already knows its target player, AI helps on multiple fronts. The most obvious is
development speed: faster prototyping, cheaper iteration, and more rapid delivery of data and insights
from real users. But it’s not just about velocity; AI can also help developers more deeply understand their
players. A growing set of tools can analyze engagement patterns, surface what’s resonating with a target
audience, and enable more effective feedback loops between developer and player community.
Crucially, players are growing more open to this shift. In Bain’s 2026 survey, 42% of players say they’re
more comfortable with the industry using AI than they were a year ago, 44% feel the same, and fewer
than one in seven are less comfortable. Among players ages 13 to 17, the signal is even clearer: 59% feel
more comfortable this year, and another 33% say their feelings are unchanged ( see Figure 2 ).
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For studios worried that AI adoption carries reputational risk with their player base, this data suggests
the window to move is open, particularly with the audiences who will define the market over the next
decade. The studios that will capture the AI margin benefit aren’t necessarily the ones with the largest
compute budgets. They’re the ones that know what they’re optimizing for—and that use faster iteration
to get closer to a defined player.
Implications for gaming executives
In this market, the most successful portfolios will have a clear focus, with AI aligned to that focus.
Three moves get a company there.
Kill unfocused games before the next budget cycle. For a large publisher, this is portfolio triage across
an existing slate. For a mid-market studio, it’s existential. A game’s greenlight decision is the last cheap
exit before sunk costs become irreversible. The discipline required is different, but the urgency is the same.
Rebuild the focused portfolio on an AI-reset cost base. This is a top-down, organization-wide
capability deployment, not simply handing API keys to individual developers and calling it good. Studios
with strong technological capabilities and deep pockets can build AI tools in-house. Most mid-market
firms should buy or partner; defending a compute position at spot prices against a better-capitalized
competitor is a losing hand.
Invest in your target player. Just as in other industries, focusing on the core customer can enable
gaming companies to maximize value creation. It may sound obvious, but the studios that pull ahead will
back their conviction with capital to match. They’ll concentrate development resources, marketing
spending, and AI investment on deepening the experience for their core player. For large publishers, the
harder discipline isn’t the initial portfolio triage; it’s resisting the pull to reinvest freed capital into new
unfocused bets. For mid-market companies, the stakes are higher; focused strategy needs to be explicit
enough to govern every greenlight decision, every hire, and every partnership decision going forward.
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At a Glance
Amid slower industry growth, boosting player engagement through personalization is becoming
more important .
Most gamers are comfortable with or neutral toward personalized offers based on their in-game
activity, a Bain survey found .
The required AI technology for personalization has improved: One early adopter lifted a LiveOps
campaign’s revenue per player by more than half .
Winning depends on having clear goals, cross-functional ownership, the right tech partners,
and the courage to start before the solution is perfect .
The gaming industry has weathered a tumultuous past few years. The pandemic boom gave way
to a consolidation wave. Now, the industry is settling into its new normal: It’s harder than ever to win
new players and keep engaging existing ones.
While some pockets of growth remain, the across-the-board expansion of the past decade has stalled.
Global gaming software revenue has grown at a compound annual rate of about 3% over the past four
years, and Bain forecasts a similar pace over the next four years (see Figure 1) . Meanwhile, gaming’s
share of total media consumption has plateaued. Most of the audience has been captured; the hours
are largely spoken for.
Gaming’s Personalization Imperative
The next growth lever isn’t more players. It’s understanding and engaging your players
better than anyone else.
By Yohann Plantec and Anders Christofferson

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Gaming Report 2026
Notes: Forecast as of December 2025; excludes hardware, advertising, and esports revenueSources: IDC; PwC; Omdia; S&P Capital IQ; Bain analysis
Figure 1: Global gaming software revenue is expected to continue growing by
about 3% annually, in line with recent years
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This isn’t a secret. The past few years brought layoffs, studio closures, dried-up funding for new games,
and delayed major releases. Consolidation has accelerated. AI is arriving, promising transformation but
also raising uncomfortable questions and not yet delivering full value. The postpandemic growth that
executives planned for five years ago hasn’t panned out. Even worse, many companies haven’t adjusted
their strategies accordingly, which will lead to weaker results.
Most executives sense that something structural has shifted. What fewer have internalized is the logical
conclusion: If the overall market isn’t growing as fast as before, then strengthening relationships with
the players you already have becomes even more crucial to long-term success.
Personalization—customizing communications, advertisements, and content to each player—is one
of the most important ways that gaming companies can boost engagement. Personalization pays off
on two fronts at once: Players get a more enjoyable, tailored experience, and that improved experience
can deliver the stronger engagement and revenue that studios are ultimately pursuing.
Gaming companies understandably pour significant time, energy, and resources into perfecting gameplay.
Now, it’s time for them to invest more in making everything outside of gameplay an amazing experience,
too. That’s where technology-enabled personalization comes in; it can help companies win players’
hearts and minds.

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Gaming Report 2026
Notes: Hypothetical scenario A was “After noticing you’d been browsing skins for a particular character, the game offers you a 20% discount on one”; scenario B was “Based on the games you play across multiple platforms and devices, the game recommends an item suited to your overall play style”; scenario C was “The game offers you a discount on a key upgrade exactly at the moment its system predicts you might stop playing”Source: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (n=5,339)
Figure 2: The vast majority of gamers feel comfortable with or neutral toward
personalized offers across different scenarios
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The value is waiting to be captured
Many executives may be surprised to learn that players are actually open to data-driven personalization.
Bain’s latest annual survey found that most gamers feel either comfortable with or neutral toward
personalized offers based on their in-game activity ( see Figure 2 ).
True one-to-one personalization has been a holy grail for decades. Other consumer categories have shown
what the playbook could look like in gaming. Video streaming platforms use viewing history, pause
behavior, and browsing patterns to recommend a customer’s next binge-worthy title. E-commerce
marketplaces serve up more relevant goods based on each person’s past searches and purchases.
Gaming companies that have direct relationships with their players at scale are sitting on rich behavioral
data. For example, companies that run their own gaming platform or operate a direct-to-consumer
subscription service have the raw material in the form of in-game micro-decisions, social graph
connections, and purchase history.
Until recently, the challenge was that the technology to deliver one-to-one personalization for gamers
didn’t exist. Now, that’s starting to change.
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What one-to-one personalization actually means, and why now
The term “personalization” gets used loosely, so it’s worth being precise. Studios have run customer
segmentation plays for years: group players into cohorts, send targeted messages, run A/B tests to
compare different offers. That’s not what we’re talking about. True one-to-one personalization means
every interaction is optimized in real time for the individual player, based on their specific behavior,
preferences, and stage of the customer life cycle—without a human analyst making every decision.
This is made possible by contextual bandit algorithms, a class of machine learning models that enable
agents to learn continuously from player behavior and optimize decisions in real time. The agent treats
every player according to what the data says will work best for that individual. It gears a high-frequency
player’s experiences toward retaining them and deepening their engagement. For example, a developer
advertising a game’s new season could send a personalized email to a casual player highlighting the
return of that player’s favorite character. Meanwhile, a hardcore player might receive an in-game
notification about the competitive ranking system launching with the new season.
Contextual bandit engines are still frontier technology, but the barrier to entry is getting lower. The tooling
has improved, the models have gotten better at inferring patterns from incomplete data, and technology
partners that can handle much of the orchestration layer have emerged.
“The technology has completely changed over the last two years and is now able to deliver real value
at a reasonable cost,” says George Khachatryan, vice president and head of AI decisioning at Braze,
one of the technology partners that Bain works with to help gaming companies implement these kinds
of solutions.
Nevertheless, only a small number of gaming companies are beginning to build the infrastructure.
Most industry participants are in wait-and-see mode.
Five places to put one-to-one personalization to work
Outside gameplay itself, the highest-impact personalization opportunities cluster around five areas.
We’ve roughly sequenced them by where ROI tends to show up first.
• In-game store and offer optimization. This includes dynamic pricing and tailored bundles based
on each player’s spending history and propensity to spend. It’s typically the fastest path to measurable
revenue growth, and it’s the area where studios with good transaction data can move quickly.
• Lapsed player reengagement. Reengagement is one of the highest-ROI use cases because the
players already know the game. This category includes intelligent campaigns that identify when a
player is drifting or has stopped playing a game, determine the right moment and channel to reach
them (email, push, in-game), and deliver a message or offer tuned to what attracted them before.
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Gaming Report 2026
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• Personalized onboarding. Most studios still deliver the same onboarding to every player. The first
few sessions playing a game are disproportionately predictive of long-term retention. By analyzing
each person’s gameplay during those initial sessions, companies can build adaptive onboarding
mechanisms outside the game—personalized hints and tips, new feature recommendations,
and so on—that reflect player skill level, play style, and preferences.
• In-game content discovery. The goal is to surface the right modes, maps, and events for each player
at the right moment. This can reduce the friction between logging in and finding something worth
doing.
• Cross-title recommendations within a portfolio. For publishers with multiple titles, using
behavioral data from one game to intelligently guide players toward others is a big opportunity.
This is where scale creates a compounding advantage: The more titles you have, the more signal
you have, and the better your recommendations become.
The real power of contextual bandit technology is that agents could assess trade-offs between these
five different areas in real time—such as deciding that the best way to engage and monetize a player is
to offer that person a bundle vs. sending an in-game recommendation or suggesting a new, similar game
in the store.
For example, by implementing Braze’s solution, a large free-to-play gaming company replaced its fixed-
schedule, broadly targeted promotions with real-time offers personalized to each player. Powered by AI
decision making built on reinforcement-learning (contextual bandit) engines, the system experimented
across thousands of unique trigger-and-offer combinations. It automatically matched a player’s in-game
behavior—for example, reaching a gameplay milestone—to the offer deemed most likely to convert them
from a free to a paying player. Dozens of customer features were fed into the system to inform each
decision. The approach boosted the in-game LiveOps campaign’s revenue per player by more than half.
The real power of contextual bandit technology is that
agents could assess trade-offs between five different areas
in real time.

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What it takes to get this right
The organizational requirements are as important as the technical ones. The most successful companies
will follow an intentional, holistic process—setting goals and measurable metrics, deeply researching the
technology’s capabilities, making build vs. buy decisions, running pilots, and executing the plan to scale
the capabilities across the organization. In our work with gaming companies around the world, we’ve
seen a few common pitfalls. Here are the four most important things to get right.
Clearly define the desired outcomes. Without clear goals, it’s impossible to develop an effective plan
and measure progress against it. For example, is the company trying to improve player satisfaction scores,
increase the number of hours played, optimize discovery of new games and in-game content, or increase
the amount of revenue per player generated over time? Setting clear objectives is the only way
to maximize this technology’s potential.
Tap the right people. The most successful companies will treat personalization as a cross-functional
capability, not a marketing tool. It touches product, monetization, community, and player support.
The studios that get this right will have a dedicated function with executive sponsorship, not a team
tucked under the CMO. Who are the enthusiastic people best equipped to champion this initiative
and make sure it succeeds?
Find the right partners. This is bleeding-edge technology, and most gaming companies likely can’t do
it all themselves. In particular, the engagement orchestration layer—the capability that sequences and
delivers personalized interactions across surfaces and channels—is an area where partnering typically
makes more sense than building from scratch. All five use cases outlined above depend on managing
the timing and sequencing of touchpoints so that the player experience feels coherent rather than noisy.
Get started now. At this challenging moment for the gaming industry, executives might feel tempted
to wait for someone else to prove the model before jumping in. They might also feel nervous about
applying AI to the customer experience, and so they’re waiting for the technology to fully mature.
That’s a mistake. Early movers aren’t just gaining a capability; they’re building a data flywheel.
These early adopters recognize that the technology is good enough now and improving extremely
quickly, and they plan to evolve with it. Those that wait for perfection will get left behind.
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At a Glance
App stores are lowering their base fees for the first time ever, as structural and regulatory
pressures reshape distribution .
Nearly half of gamers now buy directly from developers’ web stores at least once a year,
and 27% do so repeatedly .
Three-quarters of top-grossing mobile games run their own web stores, up from just 12%
in 2019, per Bain’s analysis .
A storefront with a discount attached won’t shift behavior . Building the relationship and using
it to personalize offers will .
In last year’s Gaming Report , we presented clear evidence that app stores were losing their grip on game
discovery. This year, the platform economics cracked.
For the first time ever, the base fees that major game distribution platforms charge publishers are falling.
Consumers are already bypassing the platforms in much greater numbers than most industry leaders
think. In Bain’s latest annual global gaming survey, nearly half of the more than 5,300 players we
surveyed purchased virtual currency, items, or in-game content directly from a developer’s web store
at least once in the past 12 months, including 27% that have done so multiple times (see Figure 1).
Game Distribution: Half Your Players
Already Buy Direct
Gamers are bypassing app stores more than industry leaders realize. The race to own
the customer relationship is on.
By Anders Videbaek and Benjamin Sommer

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Source: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)
Figure 1: Nearly half of all gamers have purchased directly from a game’s web
store, with 27% making repeat purchases
Gaming Report 2026
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It may surprise some in the industry, but this isn’t just a mobile phenomenon. Our survey found that
a similar share of mobile and PC/console gamers have purchased directly from a game’s own website
in the past year.
In short, the direct-to-consumer shift is already happening at scale right now—not in a few years, as many
executives have assumed. And it’s only going to accelerate, because the trend is strong among younger
gamers; 40% of 13-to-17-year-olds have made multiple direct purchases in the past year.
This chapter focuses on mobile games because that’s where the direct-to-consumer market has matured
the fastest, but the lessons apply broadly. For mobile publishers without a direct-to-consumer strategy,
the urgency is clear: They’re leaving a 15% to 30% margin improvement on the table for each third-party
sale that they could convert to direct. Those additional resources could help develop the next big game
or increase the reach of their existing titles. They’re also ceding the player relationship to whoever
moves first.
Owning that relationship opens a path to revenue growth. More data and insights enable better guidance
on what to build next and, as we’ll show, more effective customer outreach and personalized offers—
which move the purchasing needle far more than generic discounts. As competition continues
to intensify and market white space shrinks, few opportunities carry this much upside.
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Gaming Report 2026
What changed, and why now?
Two forces converged over the past three years to crack open the distribution market. The first is
structural, and it’s the story we told last year: App stores are no longer among players’ preferred stops
for discovering their next game. As platforms became less central to discovery and tech advancements
made distribution easier, publishers had little reason to keep paying relatively hefty fees on all
their revenue.
The second force is regulatory. The EU’s Digital Markets Act required platforms such as Apple and Google
to allow alternative app stores and payment routes, while a US court ruling forced Apple to let players pay
through external links.
The result is a standoff. Publishers still need the reach of Apple and Google, but they no longer want
to sacrifice so much profit margin for the privilege. The platforms need the publishers’ biggest titles,
but they can no longer dictate terms as before.
This year, as part of a legal settlement with Epic Games, Google agreed to shave its baseline cut of each
sale from 30% to 20%, and as low as 15% under certain conditions. That’s a milestone. The settlement
paved the way for Epic—the industry’s most prominent holdout—to bring Fortnite back to Google Play
after a five-year absence.
Two forces converged over the past three years to crack
open the distribution market: the first is structural and
the second is regulatory.
Mobile publishers were already moving this way
Publishers didn’t wait for platforms to budge. Three-quarters of top-grossing mobile games worldwide
now operate their own web stores, up from just 12% in 2019, according to Bain’s analysis (see Figure 2).
Official app-store charts don’t capture direct-to-consumer sales, so on the surface, the market appears
smaller and slower moving than it truly is. A 2026 report from GDC and Appcharge estimated that mobile
gaming’s direct-to-consumer revenue reached about $17 billion last year, roughly 15% of the mobile
gaming in-app purchase market. In just the past year, direct-to-consumer sales grew from roughly 25%
to 40% of total revenue for two large publishers, Modern Times Group and Playtika.

22
Gaming Report 2026
Notes: 2019 analysis includes top 50 mobile games of 2024 by annual revenue that were released in or before 2019; 2024 analysis includes top 50 highest-revenue mobile games of that year; 2026 analysis includes top 50 mobile games of 2025 by annual revenue and categorizes them based on those with live web stores as of June 2026Sources: Sensor Tower; Bain analysis of company websites
Figure 2: Three-quarters of top mobile games now operate their own dedicated
web stores, a significant increase since 2019
22
The engine powering the storefront
This new era of unbound distribution rewards not only the storefront but the engine behind it.
A web store alone is a great starting point. Capturing 15 to 30 additional margin points on every direct
transaction is a meaningful immediate gain. The barrier to entry is low: The commodity infrastructure
that makes the checkout page work, such as payment processing and identity verification, can
be purchased from vendors.
The gaming companies pulling furthest ahead, though, don’t stop there. They own the customer
relationship behind the storefront. These companies recognize that direct storefronts’ primary challenge
isn’t player awareness; it’s conversion. About 83% of all gamers are aware that these direct storefronts
exist, our survey found. Among those who have not bought directly, 68% knew it was an option but hadn’t
yet used it (see Figure 3) . That’s the audience to win over.
Our survey makes clear that discounts alone don’t persuade gamers to buy direct—the relationship does.
In a hypothetical scenario, increasing the size of the gem bonus 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
(see Figure 4).

23
Gaming Report 2026
Source: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)
Figure 3: With awareness of direct storefronts already high, the focus shifts
to converting nonbuyers who were aware of the option
23
Notes: Values are rounded; respondents were asked to consider whether they would buy directly even if it required leaving the app, logging into a browser, and entering their payment details onceSource: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)
Figure 4: Increasing the size of an incentive doesn’t move players to make
a direct purchase
Gaming Report 2025

24
Note: The hypothetical personalized offer was “After noticing you’d been browsing skins for a particular character, the game offers you a 20% discount on one” Source: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)
Figure 5: Among repeat direct buyers, 84% say a personalized offer from a game
would likely get them to make a direct purchase
Gaming Report 2026
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 (see Figure 5).
The lesson: A bare-bones storefront with a discount attached isn’t what shifts behavior. It’s developing
the relationship and using it to personalize offers.
The contrast in the hypothetical scenario above explains why relationships compound value while
discounts don’t. A player who buys direct strengthens their connection with the publisher and supplies
data that makes future offers more relevant. Those personalized offers convert far better than a basic
price cut. And the players most receptive to that kind of offer are the same ones who buy direct in the first
place, our survey found. Direct buyers are more than twice as likely to be receptive to personalized offers
as gamers who’ve never bought direct. Direct buyers are also nearly five times as likely to have increased
their spending on games in the past year. The loop feeds itself: The players you pull in directly are exactly
the ones the engine monetizes best.
What shifts behavior is developing the relationship and using
it to personalize offers.
Some of the required capabilities may be new for gaming companies. These include strengthening the
ability to find players (user acquisition), knowing who the target player is and what they want (behavioral
data), and understanding how to reach them directly and keep them (customer relationship management
and live operations). That engine is what turns the margin gain into a durable, compounding advantage.
Gaming Report 2025

25
Gaming Report 2026
Implications for gaming executives
A significant share of gamers are switching their buying habits right now. Every quarter a publisher
delays its direct-to-consumer strategy is a quarter that its competitors are building direct player
relationships and capturing the margin gains that follow. Three moves will position companies to lead.
Build or buy the engine while the window is open. The fee reset is real, but the window to capture the
value at stake won’t stay open indefinitely. Those who wait face the same build at a higher cost, against
competitors with years of direct data and relationships.

For midsize publishers, the platform fee savings alone should typically cover the cost of building a web
store within a year. For smaller publishers without the scale to justify building, the move is to partner,
but the decision itself can’t wait.
Restate your view of the market based on triangulated data, not app-store charts alone. App-store
charts, by design, can’t see direct sales. Boards working from uncorrected numbers aren’t just missing
data; they’re planning against an incomplete picture of the competitive landscape. The fix is triangulation:
Combine app-store data with publisher disclosures, third-party field reports, and your own player
research. The most effective companies will use this as an opening to revisit their entire approach to
competitive intelligence in the AI era. The amount of available data is increasing significantly, and many
gaming companies likely aren’t taking full advantage.
Decide which games to move and in what sequence. Moving to direct sales isn’t a single decision;
it’s a portfolio question. Publishers that try to move everything at once can spread their capabilities too
thin and underperform on all fronts. The smarter approach is to identify the one or two titles where the
engine is strongest, move those first, build the playbook, and sequence the rest of the portfolio from there.
Games with deep engagement, strong live ops, and established player communities are the natural
candidates to move first.
For one large publisher, the decision was guided by which games’ players were most ready to migrate
and whose purchase mechanics decoupled most naturally from the core gameplay loop. The first titles
the company chose had a large share of players with existing company accounts registered outside third-
party app stores. That enabled the publisher to prompt recurring purchases via a pre-renewal email
rather than an in-game push. In addition, these games’ internal development teams were excited to pilot
the first migration.
Each subsequent title moved at a lower incremental cost because the direct-to-consumer infrastructure,
player data, and organizational playbook built on the first wave of games could be redeployed across the
portfolio. As a result, direct channels now account for more than a third of the company’s total revenue.

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