The end of the average gamer: why choosing your players is the 2026 strategy

Bain & Company's latest Gamer Survey makes a simple, uncomfortable point: there is no longer such a thing as the average gamer. Players have fragmented into distinct segments — by genre, platform, spending behaviour and the way they socialise around games — and each segment expects to be addressed on its own terms.

The strategic conclusion is blunt: "The losing move in 2026 is trying to serve all of them." The question every gaming CEO should be asking 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?"

For indie studios, this is actually good news. You were never going to outspend a AAA publisher on reach — but you can absolutely out-choose them. Picking the right player segment, understanding what motivates it, and building a direct relationship with it is a game a small studio can win.

That choice, however, cannot be a guess. It requires knowing which segments exist for your genre, how big they are, what they play, where they gather and what they are willing to pay. In other words: market research before marketing spend.

This is exactly what our Market Research service is built for: data analytics, player personas, market potential and benchmarks & trends — the groundwork that lets you answer Bain's question ("Which players do we choose?") with evidence rather than intuition, and then engage them through the channels and messages that actually fit.