How much does the average gamer spend on games per year?

How to get close to this number

Divide industry revenue by paying players. The sector earns a couple of hundred billion a year and a bit over a billion people spend anything at all, which gives an average in the low hundreds of dollars. Revenue divided by paying users is the standard route for any per-user spending question.

The concentration in the explanation is the part that makes the average misleading: a small fraction of players generates the majority of in-game purchase revenue across most free-to-play titles. The industry term for them is unflattering and widely used, and it describes a business model built around a minority rather than a market.

That structure is the same shape as the lottery question elsewhere on this site, and it raises the same concerns. When most of a revenue stream comes from a small group spending far above the average, the design incentive is to optimise for that group rather than for the median customer — which shapes what the products become.