The gaming industry grew 7.5 percent to 197 billion dollars, yet almost nobody feels safe anymore. How can an industry grow this fast while so many players are quietly losing?
Let’s stop pretending this is a crisis of demand. It is not. The market is not shrinking. It grew faster than forecast. Mobile and PC carried that growth. Console followed, but slower. This is not collapse. This is hardening.
More than half of all gaming revenue now comes from mobile, and most players live there too. At the same time, PC players generate far more money per user, while consoles remain powerful only in specific regions like the West and Japan. Reach sits on one side. Revenue on the other. The distance between them keeps growing.
In the US and the UK, smartphone gaming has hit the ceiling. Almost everyone who can play already does. Growth there is minimal, not because interest is gone, but because there are no new devices left to sell. Turkey and Brazil are still expanding. Poland and India are already flattening. Hardware sets the limit, not creativity.
What is growing is intensity. The share of heavy users is rising everywhere. Fewer new players, but players who play more, expect more, and leave faster. On mobile this effect is strongest. On PC and console it exists too, just muted. That pressure never goes away. It compounds.
Those users are no longer loyal to a single platform. The share of people playing on multiple devices is increasing in every measured market. No country shows a decline. Platform first thinking belongs to the past. Users move freely. Products usually do not.
Then there is attention. Streaming and short video take more time than games across all regions. Mobile games sit somewhere between social media and video. PC and console vary by country, but nowhere do games dominate daily life. Games do not own attention. They rent it, week by week.
Money follows the same pattern. When people are asked what they paid for last month, games compete directly with streaming, music, and other apps. In several countries, non gaming spend outranks gaming. Games are not fighting other games. They are fighting everything that dares to charge monthly.
Meanwhile, non gaming apps grow faster. More downloads. More revenue. Gaming still grows, but it is losing relative share inside the app economy. At the same time, revenue concentrates harder at the top. On both iOS and Google Play, a shrinking number of titles capture a growing share. The middle tier is disappearing.
User acquisition only sharpens the divide. iOS absorbs a disproportionate share of ad spend, especially in the US and the UK. Android delivers scale. iOS delivers margin. That split decides who survives.
And retention keeps eroding. Day one retention hovers around thirty percent. Day seven often falls below fourteen. Day thirty rarely clears six. Globally, early retention keeps declining. People still try games. They just do not stay.
This is not new. Music went through this. Media did too. Growth remained. Power shifted. Distribution became expensive. Attention became scarce. Emotional attachment mattered more than quality alone. Those who kept building for the old model were not overtaken. They were ignored.
The industry is still growing, but the window you are building for has already closed.
A bit shoutout to Mariusz Gąsiewski, who gave me insights in his recent report.
