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Gambling is reshaping video games, time, money and attention in 2026, report says
readwrite.com
Friday, February 20, 2026
For years, gambling lived on the outer edges of the video game business. It was boxed in by geography, hemmed in by regulation, and treated as culturally separate from mainstream gaming. However, the wall has now largely come down. The State of Video Gaming in 2026 by Epyllion’s CEO Matthew Ba...
For years, gambling lived on the outer edges of the video game business. It was boxed in by geography, hemmed in by regulation, and treated as culturally separate from mainstream gaming. However, the wall has now largely come down.
The State of Video Gaming in 2026 by Epyllion’s CEO Matthew Ball argues that gambling, especially iGaming, online sports betting, and prediction markets, has become one of the biggest forces redirecting how players use their time and money. Instead of operating in parallel with games, the platforms are increasingly competing with them head-on.
There has been a steady change in leisure time toward interactive systems that keep users engaged around the clock and, more often than not, put real money on the line. Video games are no longer just battling other games for attention. They are also up against a fast-growing web of gambling-adjacent platforms engineered for constant participation.
Gamers are playing less, but not quitting
The report’s survey data shows that Americans are playing video games less often than they once did. But most haven’t stopped.
Among U.S. adults, 46 out of 100 say they game less frequently than in the past. For adults between 18 and 45, that number climbs to 59 out of 100. Even so, gaming remains widespread. Overall, 76% of adults still play. In the 18–45 group, that figure jumps to 92%.
What’s happening looks less like abandonment and more like compression. Players are shaving hours off their gaming time rather than cutting it out entirely. The report frames this as a fight over discretionary hours, but not a complete cultural rejection of games.
The distinction matters as many of the same people who are trimming their gaming sessions are spending more time on platforms tied directly to gambling. And the competition isn’t passive entertainment like television, rather it’s interactive, social, and frequently transactional.
Where the video game industry and gambling overlap
The sharpest overlap shows up among men aged 18–34. They represent just 15% of the U.S. adult population, yet their footprint across gambling categories is outsized.
According to the report’s breakdown of regular users, the group accounts for 37% of iGaming participants, 46% of online sports bettors, 49% of active cryptocurrency traders, and 43% of prediction market users.
The intensity of engagement stands out even more than the raw participation numbers because compared with the average U.S. adult, men 18–34 are 2.6 times as likely to play iGaming casino titles multiple times per week or daily. They are 3.3 times as likely to place sports bets, 3.6 times as likely to trade crypto actively, and 3.1 times as likely to use prediction markets.
These are not occasional experiments. They are recurring habits. And they compete directly with gaming sessions for both attention and disposable income.
Importantly, this same demographic still over-indexes in traditional gaming, especially on console and PC. This overlap is what makes gambling’s rise so disruptive as it’s tapping into gaming’s core customers.
Spending patterns have reinforced the switch. Since 2021, U.S. consumer spending on video game content, software, and services has slipped slightly, moving from $52.49 billion to $52.30 billion, a $190 million decline.
Over that same stretch, combined spending on OnlyFans, online sports betting, and iGaming soared from $11.3 billion to $32.8 billion, which is a $21.5 billion increase in just a few years.
The report draws attention to the fact that these national totals are powered by concentrated user bases. Roughly 30 million Americans account for sports betting losses, about 10 million for OnlyFans, 22 million for crypto trading, 9 million for prediction markets, and 32 million for iGaming. The report notes that those users “massively over-index to video gaming,” particularly on high-revenue platforms such as console and PC.
In other words, the same consumers who historically drove gaming’s monetization are now spreading their dollars across a wider array of interactive platforms.
iGaming growth even more pronounced in China
iGaming illustrates the shift most clearly. Defined here as real-money digital casino games that let players cash out winnings, iGaming has moved from niche to mainstream at striking speed.
In the United States, growth swung from –0.4% in 2021 to +12.0% by 2025. Outside China, international growth climbed from +10% to +30% during the same period, even as some major markets maintained bans. By 2025, iGaming accounts for 21% of all U.S. video game consumer spend and is already twice as large as the traditional mobile casino game category.
On a global scale, legal iGaming markets now generate $54 billion per year in player losses, up from $11 billion in 2019. The report points out that this figure equals roughly 45% of total video game spending worldwide.
At the design level, the line between gaming and gambling is getting harder to see. Comparing mobile casino games that do not allow cash-out with iCasino slots, the report argues that the gap can feel largely semantic, which is perhaps why US states have been attempting to curb its rise.
In mechanics, design, and IP, there’s little difference between ‘mobile gaming’ slots and ‘iCasino’ slots. And if a player’s $20 goes in and never returns, how different is it?
The State of Video Gaming in 2026
This has revived long-running debates over monetization in games. Whether money disappears through randomized loot systems or through an explicit wager, the financial outcome for the player may look similar. What differs is the regulation and the speed at which funds can flow back out.
Sports betting shows a similar trajectory. Global net player losses reached $69.7 billion in 2025. In the United States alone, losses surpassed $17 billion, a 35-fold increase from 2019. As more states legalize the practice, annual U.S. growth continues at roughly 35%.
Even in states where access remains limited, both iGaming and sports betting are scaling swiftly. Despite being legal in only seven states, iGaming has already grown to twice the size of the nationwide mobile casino game category.
Prediction markets are smaller in total dollars but heavy in time demands. In the fourth quarter alone, users placed around 1.5 million bets per day, with an average notional value of $300 per wager. These platforms often require research, constant tracking, and social discussion, hours that might once have gone to gaming.
A structural shift in attention from the video game sector to gambling
The report ultimately argues that the core constraint is time. Leisure hours are finite, and more platforms are competing for them.
As the report puts it: “Video gaming’s post-pandemic problem isn’t that players choose to watch TikTok instead of buy a AAA game, or subscribe to OnlyFans instead of buying a PlayStation; it’s that on a Friday evening, players are placing a growing share of their time and spend elsewhere.”
Push notifications, live odds, rapidly updating markets, and social feeds keep gambling apps in constant rotation. They surface during the same prime social windows that once belonged to multiplayer sessions or new game launches.
Taken together, the data suggests something deeper than a cyclical dip. Gambling has embedded itself inside the same behavioral loops, demographics, and monetization patterns that fueled gaming’s rise over the past two decades.
For game publishers, the challenge is no longer just building better titles, but to compete with systems explicitly built to monetize attention continuously, legally, and at scale. In that environment, gambling is no longer a side category.
It is one of gaming’s closest rivals.
Featured image: Canva
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