Gaming Revenue Is Up. But You're Playing Less.

Gaming revenue keeps climbing. The press releases keep coming. And yet if you look at Matthew Ball's 2026 State of Video Gaming report, something breaks the story.

Mobile playtime is down. People are spending fewer hours playing games, not more. The industry isn't winning the attention war — it's losing it, specifically to short-form video. TikTok, Reels, Shorts. That's where the time went.

So how does revenue go up when playtime goes down and the player base isn't meaningfully growing? That question is worth sitting with. Because the answer isn't a happy one.

The crisis in the games industry isn't just about TikTok eating attention. It's structural. Massive layoffs hit the sector through 2025 and into 2026 — by some counts, 30% of the workforce gone in two years. Studios closed. Projects cancelled.

2025 was described as the industry hitting rock bottom. That's not hyperbole. That's people losing jobs and games not getting made.

And yet the revenue line stays green. How do you square that? You don't — unless you understand that the revenue isn't coming from growth. It's coming from squeezing harder.

Here's the thing the headline numbers hide: real spend — adjusted for what money actually buys — has barely moved in five years. The player count is roughly stable. Steam hit 41 million concurrent users, but that's a ceiling, not a ramp.

What changed is prices. Candy Crush raised prices on basic packs by 50%. That's not an outlier — that's a signal. When you can't find new players and existing players aren't spending more voluntarily, you raise the price on the players you have.

The industry figured out that a subset of players will keep paying regardless. So the model shifted: fewer players, higher extraction per player. The base gets smaller. The bill per person gets bigger. That's not growth. That's inflation dressed up as a success story.

Microtransactions were the original pitch: small amounts, optional, cosmetic. A dollar here. Two dollars there. Nobody noticed, and the numbers looked great.

That's not what they are anymore. The packs are bigger. The bundles are more aggressive. The friction to spend is lower and the pressure to spend is higher. 2026 is shaping up to be the most expensive year to be a gaming fan — not because games got better, but because the pricing got bolder.

The math is simple. If you can't grow the audience and you can't grow playtime, you grow revenue by raising what each session costs. The player sitting there for an hour is the asset. And assets get monetized.

At some point the micro in microtransaction stopped being accurate. Nobody updated the name.

There's a version of this story where it works out. Prices stabilize, games get better, players come back. Some 2026 predictions are optimistic about a reset — fewer releases, higher quality, less noise.

But the structural problem doesn't go away because you're hopeful about it. If playtime is falling and you're competing with platforms that are free and infinite and designed by entire teams whose only job is to keep you scrolling — that's a hard problem. Price increases don't solve it. They accelerate it.

The players who leave because the hobby got too expensive don't come back when the next battle pass drops. They're already watching something else.

Globant's 2026 gaming report tries to find the upside. And maybe it's there. But the baseline reality — flat real spend, shrinking playtime, rising prices — isn't something you reframe your way out of.