A new report from global data firm Newzoo, created in collaboration with Tebex, a monetization platform that videogame studios use for in-game spending, has a few major revelations based on data collected in the past six months on the modern gaming landscape about the spending habits of gamers.
The report, titled, Unlocking Games Revenue: Player Behavior and Payment Trends in the West, shares that according to Newzoo's findings, North American gamers spend an annual average of $325 per person on videogames per year. For European gamers, that number is $125 per person per year. All that spending comes from only 20% of the global videogaming population, or as Newzoo puts it, "A small share of players, a large share of spend."
Newzoo also predicts that the global videogame market will balloon to $188.9 billion, with 46% of that spending coming from North America and Europe.
For clarification, as you can see in the graph below, Newzoo defines a player in this case as "All people who play (digital) games on a PC, console, mobile device, or cloud gaming service in the past six months." Another interesting tidbit that's not in the least bit surprising if you're even remotely aware of how most people play videogames nowadays, is that there are way more mobile gamers than PC and console gamers. According to Newzoo, there are 930 million PC gamers, 653 million console gamers, and 2,945 million mobile gamers. Or, to say it another way, almost 3 billion mobile gamers.
But for all that spending, is there any growth to it? In North America, from 2023 and looking into the future to 2027, Newzoo predicts a 1.1% annual growth. In Europe, it expects a 3.1% annual growth in that same time frame. That's "slower growth in mature markets," according to Newzoo, who also says that to respond to the slow growth in such high spending markets, "studios must look beyond new payer acquisition - evolving monetization strategies will be key to driving value and engagement."
And that's one of the key takeaways from the report, according to Newzoo and Tebex. That studios need to look towards "deeper monetization" for the future of the industry.
"With modest payer growth in North America and Europe, studios must shift focus from acquiring new payers to maximizing value from existing ones. Aligning monetization with how and why players choose to spend is essential to driving engagement and revenue," Newzoo and Tebex write as the first key takeaway at the bottom of the report.
When Fortnite first launched in 2017, it was one of many videogames players could choose to spend their time with on their preferred platform, with the distinction of a platform in videogames generally meaning a specific piece of hardware. Fast-forward to 2025, and Epic couldn't care less whether you play Fortnite on your phone, your console, or PC, because Fortnite is the platform now.
Individual games are extracting more out of individual players than ever before, but how games go about doing that is what matters, as Newzoo and Tebex point out. Not every game can be successful trying to sell hundreds of thousands of microtransactions, nor can they all be successful premium releases. And with the uproar around rising prices, increasing the buy-in for every game isn't the answer either.
"Today's players want to know what they're paying for - and why," writes Liam Wiltshire, head of payments and compliance at Tebex. "How you monetize matters more than ever. Evolving monetization strategies are key to driving deeper engagement and long-term value."
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