Gaming advertising is no longer a niche. The global gaming market hit $184 billion in 2024, with 3.4 billion people playing video games worldwide. It’s a massive space for marketers to explore and connect with their target audiences. Let’s dive into gaming advertising—what new insights we gained in 2024 and what we can expect in 2025.
Gaming advertising – reaching engaged audiences
As 2024 comes to an end, gaming has been a focal point for advertisers over the past 12 months. It’s clearly going mainstream, becoming a primary form of entertainment for millions worldwide – for example, more than half of the US consumers love or like playing video games.
Marketers recognize the enormous potential of gaming advertising. Over 90% of them say games advertising helps them with the right consumers. Moreover, 85% of marketers agree that games advertising is a high-quality, premium place to advertise, according to the IAB’s “Changing the game” report.
Let’s explore which brands have stepped into gaming advertising and whether they’re satisfied with the results.
How brands use gaming advertising to reach their target audiences?
There are various—and often very creative—ways to engage gamers as they spend time with their favorite games. Global brands like BMW and Mercedes-Benz invested heavily in esports and gaming, in-game advertising is a form in which companies such as Spotify, Uber or Lego invest.
According to IAB, almost 90% of marketers who invested in games advertising, said the importance of gaming advertising is growing to their company, and 40% planned to increase spending in 2024.
Why are marketers investing in gaming advertising? 2024 brought us some facts, stats and trends about players and gaming as a leading form of entertainment. Let’s take a closer look at these insights and understand what makes gaming advertising so effective.
Key factors driving the rise of gaming advertising
What makes advertisers want to invest in gaming advertising. A mix of various elements, but let’s analyze the most important ones. We grouped them in three general categories.
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Gamers profiles
Who are today’s gamers? Definitely, they are no longer teenagers playing games all day long in dark rooms. The average gamer age is 35, and there are about 1.7 billion male gamers and nearly 1.4 billion female gamers.
What’s more? One of the most important things from the marketers perspective is their spending power, which can be even 2x higher than non-gamers. Super Gamers (gamers who view gaming as their primary source of entertainment) spend on video games monthly nearly 8x as much as casual gamers (gamers who only view gaming as an entertainment option).
As you can see, gamers are a huge audience with strong spending power, so they are incredibly attractive group for advertisers globally. To read more about players’ profile, check out our post “Gaming audiences – how to reach today’s players?”
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Cultural Relevance
Games are one of the main forms of entertainment, especially for the younger generations. And they are increasingly entering mainstream media. Let’s list just a few examples:
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners – animation miniseries based on the video game Cyberpunk 2077 by Polish studio CD Projekt Red.
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie – animated adventure comedy film based on Nintendo’s Mario video game franchise. According to Wikipedia the film “grossed $1.36 billion worldwide and broke multiple box-office records, including the highest grossing film based on a video game, and the first film based on a video game to gross over $1 billion.”
- Sonic the Hedgehog 3 – an action-adventure comedy film based on the video game series. The film has grossed $422.4 million worldwide on a budget of $122 million, becoming the highest-grossing film in the franchise.
And there are many more examples of games going into the mainstream (we can mention Fallout TV series, Resident Evil, Pokemon, or Secret Level miniseries). There are also many more game-related products than only movies or animations.
Beyond movies and animations, there’s a vast ecosystem of game-related products: gaming gadgets, gifts, stickers, events, clothing, phone covers, and more. The game market is as vast as an ocean.
This proves that the audience interested in games is massive. That’s why marketers are increasingly focusing on games, a trend that will only grow stronger in the coming years.
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Cross-Platform Ecosystems enabling global reach for marketers
To maximize their reach, game studios often publish games across multiple platforms, including consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. On the other hand, users can choose from hundreds of fascinating and engaging games no matter which platform they use. Even with just a mobile device, players can carry a world of fantastic games right in their pocket.
Let’s look at some numbers to get a sense of how many players are active on various platforms:
- Mobile players globally – 2.2 billion
- Play Stations 4 and 5 units sold – 180 million
- Xbox One units sold – 58 million
- Nintendo Switch units sold – 146 million
- Steam users – 185 million monthly active users
These figures clearly illustrate the massive number of players across all platforms, showing that marketers can connect with gamers no matter which platform they prefer. And it also shows that gaming is a mainstream form of entertainment for audiences globally.
Reaching gamers in 2025 – what to expect
Games are highly popular, especially in younger generations, advertisers invest in gaming advertising and treat this area as a premium inventory. So, what will be the most important trends in gaming advertising this year?
Digital will be still dominating in gaming
95% of global game market revenues come from digital channels. For marketers, this means gaming audiences spend most of their time on digital devices. Even when they’re not playing games, they remain online—watching gaming-related videos for over 8 hours weekly.
With target audiences dedicating significant time to gaming and consuming related content on digital platforms, it’s clear that digital is the most effective channel for reaching gamers. And marketers have numerous opportunities to engage players online, understand their behavior, and offer them products or services tailored strictly to their preferences.
One of the biggest advantages of targeting gamers through digital channels is the precision and measurability these platforms provide. Advertisers can track and optimize various elements of their campaigns with ease. And most of ad budgets will go to digital media (nearly 60% of global ad spend went to digital channels in 2024).
Marketers Will Explore Targeting Gamers Through Programmatic Campaigns
With the gaming market’s rapid growth and its massive, ever-expanding audience, advertisers are increasingly focusing on gamers and the opportunities to reach them. According to the dentsu gaming report, “there are too many opportunities for brands to ignore in gaming today”. Gamers are now a target group for popular industries such as automotive, FMCG, retail, e-commerce, finance, and more.
One of the fastest and the easiest ways to reach gamers is through programmatic campaigns, in which marketers can use gaming segments to precisely reach their target audiences. These campaigns allow advertisers to reach players on digital platforms, including desktops, mobile devices, and connected TVs (CTV).
What are the key benefits of programmatic campaigns targeted at players?
– reach efficiency – deliver messages to precisely selected audiences on target markets,
– low media waste – optimize your ad budget by targeting only the most relevant users while maintaining real-time control over your campaigns,
– optimized conversion and ROI – programmatic campaigns enable marketers to optimize their campaigns and focus on increasing conversions and ROI; you constantly optimize your campaigns to target the most relevant audiences.
Reaching your gamers effectively in 2025 with OAN gaming data
As OAN, we provide gaming audiences globally for programmatic campaigns to help marketers reach their target groups among players. We deliver over 600 high-quality gaming audiences including mobile gamers and desktop players.
We also create custom gaming segments on demand. We build them on special occasions, such as big game releases, and we prepare custom segments tailored to your campaigns’ needs.
If you need to reach, for example, gamers from generation Z, from big cities in the US or if you are looking for – for example – Fallout fans, just contact us to talk about delivering this segment.