The rich buy full-price new games like “Donkey Kong Bananza” and “Battlefield 6,” the poor play “Fortnite”, mobile titles, and use subscription services – and that division is only getting bigger.
That’s the basic summary of a new interview with Circana veteran industry analyst Mat Piscatella about the state of gaming in 2025.
Appearing on Kyle Bosman’s Delayed Input podcast (via Games Radar), Piscatella says the soaring cost of living prices in recent years, especially in everyday spending categories like food and housing, is having a knock-on effect on video gaming – more specifically, what kinds of video games people play.
The result is an increasingly separated and polarised gaming ecosystem. On the one hand, you have the more affluent players who are “continuing to spend as if prices haven’t really changed” and “might not even realise the prices have gone up in some areas”.
He adds that these people have no problems spending $70 on “Ghost of Yotei” and spending more on a PS5 or Switch 2. High-end PC users who can afford costly graphics cards also likely fall into this category.
Then there are the not-so-well-off players who are struggling to make rent or having to deal with the rising costs of groceries. As a result, their playtime is shifting to markets that are more affordable.
Those markets, he says, are the ones driving mobile titles and free-to-play titles such as “Roblox” or “Fortnite”. They are also the group likely to gravitate towards subscriptions like Game Pass and pull back on buying games at retail price.
He says this can be seen in membership services like PlayStation Plus and Nintendo Switch Online, services which have both seen solid growth throughout 2025. Even MMOs for older titles are getting spending bumps from this shift.
The comments come as Sony just announced the other day that “Ghost of Yotei” had sold 3.3 million copies in its first month, sparking a furore of online arguments about whether that’s considered a success or not (in comparison, “Ghost of Tsushima” took four months to reach the 5 million mark).
