Is “gamers” one audience? What a study of 116,047 players found
A survey built to study problem gaming also produced something marketers rarely get: a map of 116,047 players, what they play, and the device they play it on. The four groups barely overlap.
Shooters are the favourite of 36% of console players and 17% of phone players; strategy games 35% on laptops and 4% on consoles. How to read the gaming channel, from 116,047 players.
Same room, same hour, often very different games. Photo: Raman Shaunia on Unsplash.
The short answer
No. Among 116,047 players from across the world, the machine someone chose predicted what they played far better than anything else on file. Shooters were the favourite game of 36% of console players and 17% of phone players. Strategy games ran the other way: 35% on laptops, 4% on consoles. Four in five preferred games had multiplayer in them, and those players reported the heaviest and most troubled play. Yet the same tags were close to useless for judging any one person, which is the part most media plans get backwards.
Key takeaways
Action was the common ground: it sat on about three in four favourite games on consoles and computers, and on 60% of them on phones.
Massively multiplayer worlds were the pick of 30% of desktop players and 14% of console players.
Phones were the least social screen: 66% of their players' favourites had multiplayer, against 82% on desktops.
Game tags barely predicted any individual's score on the gaming-disorder scales (R from .08 to .15), so they describe crowds, not people.
What the researchers did
Disclosure before we start: I am one of the four authors, so take the enthusiasm with a pinch of salt.
Davide Marengo (University of Turin), Halley Pontes (Birkbeck, University of London), Christian Montag
(University of Macau) and I wanted to know whether the kind of game someone loves says anything about how
much trouble their gaming causes them. The survey ran in 2019 through the Electronic Sports League as part
of a healthy-gaming campaign, with no payment on offer; players got a personal read-out of their own habits
instead. After cleaning, 116,047 people were left.
Everyone named their current favourite game in a free-text box. Those titles were matched to RAWG, a public
database of more than 618,000 games, which supplied the genre tags and a yes/no flag for multiplayer. Each
player also reported the device they mostly use, how long they play, and answered two standard questionnaires
on disordered gaming, one built on the American psychiatric criteria and one on the World Health Organization's.
People
116,047 players, from an opening pool of 188,775 responses across 181 countries
Who they were
Average age 24.1 (range 12 to 80), 92.9% male, 51.6% educated beyond school
Time on the hobby
23.3 hours a week on average
Devices
Desktop 57.0%, console 27.1%, laptop 12.3%, phone or tablet 3.5%
Game classification
Genre tags and a multiplayer flag pulled from the RAWG database
Four screens, four shopping lists
Start with the common ground. Action tags sat on most of the favourites named on every screen. Below that line
the four groups pull apart.
Console players leaned into things you can watch someone do: shooters (36%), adventure (31%), sports (9%) and
fighting games (6%), the last at more than four times the rate found on any computer. Desktop and laptop
players went for worlds that keep running: massively multiplayer games (30% and 25%), role-playing games
(43% and 46%), indie titles (12% on both) and strategy, which climbed from 4% on consoles to 26% on desktops
and 35% on laptops. Phone and tablet players were the quiet opposite: arcade (11%), casual (11%), card games
(5%) and puzzles (4%), each several times higher than anywhere else.
These are the favourite titles of real people, not a panel's claimed interests, which makes the contrast
useful. A sponsorship, a product placement or an in-game media buy that treats all four groups as "gamers"
is buying four different rooms with one brief.
Share whose favourite game is a shooter, by preferred device
Share whose favourite game is a shooter, by preferred device
Group
Value (%)
Console
36.1
Desktop computer
31.2
Laptop
24.3
Phone or tablet
16.7
Table 2: 116,047 players, estimated marginal means from the published models.
Age lives in the genre, not in the channel
Marketers often reach for gaming when the brief says young. The data inside the channel is more interesting
than that. Older players in this sample drifted towards board games, card games, puzzles, adventure and
role-playing titles; younger ones towards action, arcade and shooters, and towards anything with other
people in it.
Education tracked the same line. Players with a degree were more likely to pick board, card and puzzle games
and less likely to pick action, arcade and shooters. Women, who made up 7% of this particular sample, showed
a mild pull towards casual games and nothing else worth reporting.
So the age read comes from the genre, not from the fact that someone games at all. A puzzle app and a shooter
sit in the same industry and sell to different decades.
Almost nobody is playing alone
Multiplayer was the rule rather than the exception: 78% of the favourite games had it. The habit was strongest
on computers and weakest on phones, and it was not a fringe of hardcore titles either, since even casual and
card games now routinely ship with someone else in them.
It is also where the weight sits. Players whose favourite game had multiplayer scored higher on both
disordered-gaming scales, and on consoles the pattern was sharpest, with multiplayer, massively multiplayer,
casual and shooter preferences all tilting upwards. Puzzles and platformers tilted the other way. The
differences were small in statistical terms, but they ran in the same direction under both diagnostic systems
and across 116,047 people.
For anyone buying attention in games, that is a double message. The audience you most want is sitting in
social, never-ending titles, and those are the same titles where a minority of players are struggling. Pushing
spend or urgency at that group is a risk worth naming out loud in the plan.
Share whose favourite game has multiplayer features
Share whose favourite game has multiplayer features
Group
Value (%)
Desktop computer
82.0
Laptop
81.0
Console
70.5
Phone or tablet
66.0
Table 2: multiplayer tag taken from the RAWG entry for each player's favourite game.
Past the console
Here is the finding that travels furthest. When the team fed every genre tag and the multiplayer flag into a
machine-learning model and asked it to predict an individual's disordered-gaming score, it managed almost
nothing: a correlation between .08 and .15 between predicted and actual scores. The labels describe the crowd
well and the person badly.
Reading past what the paper set out to test, that gap is the shape of most audience data. Device, genre,
platform, channel: these are strong group facts and weak personal ones. They are good enough to decide where
a campaign runs and what it looks like, and nowhere near good enough to decide what one customer is like, how
much they can afford or whether they are in trouble.
The same split applies well outside games. Streaming services, fitness apps, trading platforms and betting
products all sort their users by the surface they use and then draw conclusions about individuals from it. The
first half of that move is sound. The second half, on this evidence, is wishful.
Marketing in 3 steps
Ready. Set. Market.
1
ReadyDecide and prepare
Split the audience by device before anything else. Get the console, PC and mobile breakdown for the specific titles or creators you are buying, from the publisher or the platform's own reporting. Treat the three as separate audiences with separate budgets.
Name the genre in the brief. Write "console shooters" or "mobile puzzle players" into the brief, never "gamers". Pick the genre from where your product actually fits, and let it set the tone, the length and the humour.
2
SetBuild it
Build the activation for two people, not one. Assume the player has someone alongside them: a co-op mode, a referral code that needs a second player, a reward that unlocks in a party. Solo-player mechanics leave most of the audience out.
Set the age and tone from the genre, not the channel. Write to the genre's own demographic: puzzle, board and card audiences skew older and more educated, action and shooter audiences younger. Never let "it's gaming" be the reason a campaign is written young.
3
MarketLaunch and measure
Offer a mirror instead of a prize. Give players something about themselves — their stats, their year in review, a personalised ranking — in place of a discount or a draw. It costs little and earns better data than an incentive does.
Report by device and genre, and never score a player. Build the dashboard around device and genre segments, where the differences are real. Do not profile individuals from the games they play, and cap spend prompts to the heaviest-playing segment.
What to expect
Large gaps between devices, small gaps between people. Genre splits of 20 or 30 points are normal here; the differences in individual behaviour behind them are slight.
Mobile is a different business. Arcade, casual and card games were several times more popular on small screens than anywhere else, and shooters far less.
Your own mix will not match this one. The sample is 93% male and PC-heavy, recruited through competitive gaming.
Both measuring systems agree. The WHO and American criteria produced the same pattern, so the findings do not hinge on which questionnaire you trust.
Where it does not work
A 2019 snapshot. Data were collected before the pandemic; mobile gaming in particular has changed a great deal since.
An esports crowd, not the market. Recruitment through the Electronic Sports League drew competitive PC players and very few casual ones.
Blunt tags. Genre labels and a yes/no multiplayer flag come from a community database, so a game with an optional co-op mode counts the same as a persistent online world.
A snapshot, not a cause. Everything is self-reported and measured at one moment, so nothing here shows that a genre creates heavy play rather than attracting it.
Questions marketers ask
Which device do most gamers use?
In this sample, 57.0% preferred a desktop computer, 27.1% a console, 12.3% a laptop and 3.5% a phone or tablet. Recruitment ran through a competitive gaming platform, so the mix leans towards PCs and away from the mobile-heavy picture most market reports show (Marengo et al., 2026).
Do console and PC players want different games?
Clearly. Role-playing games were the favourite of 43% of desktop players against 32% of console players; adventure titles ran the other way, 31% on consoles against 16% on desktops; and fighting games were around four times as common on consoles as on either kind of computer.
How many hours a week do committed gamers play?
An average of 23.3 hours in this sample, which is a working half-week and a reminder of how much attention the channel holds.
Is multiplayer gaming more risky than single-player?
On average, slightly. Favourites with multiplayer in them went with higher scores on both gaming-disorder questionnaires, while puzzle and platformer fans scored lower. Every one of these associations was small.
Can you spot a problem gamer from the games they choose?
No. A model handed the full set of tags for someone's favourite game predicted their score at a correlation of .15 at the very best, and .08 among phone players, which is close to nothing when the question is about one person.
More than 23,000 Reddit discussions from the Call of Duty and Battlefield communities were mined for the ways players stick up for the game they love. Six kinds of advocacy came out, from defending the brand to showing off knowledge of it. The two communities argued in different registers, one about story and the other about technical craft, and both produced the same intensity of support.
Setting a price and drop odds for a randomised reward turns out to be a hard optimisation problem. The authors show when it can be solved exactly, when a good approximation is available, and how item values and rarity translate into a workable design. Anyone selling mystery boxes, blind packs or gacha pulls is making these choices already, usually by feel.
Source
Marengo, D., Schivinski, B., Pontes, H. M., & Montag, C. (2026). The role of videogame genre and platform in gaming disorder tendencies: A large-scale world-wide study of gamers' preferences. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 15(2), 735-745. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.2026.00022
This brief is written for practitioners from the published article. Open access (CC BY-NC 4.0): free to read at the publisher. Numbers are as reported by the authors; read the article for full methods.
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Bruno Schivinski is Associate Professor of Marketing at Gdańsk University of Technology. He studies how consumers engage with brands in digital and social media.
