Gaming Report
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Executive Summary
This article is part of Bain's 2026 Gaming Report. Scroll through any gaming industry newsletter from the past two years, and a pattern emerges: Another high-profile title stumbles, another postmortem asks what went wrong. The names change, but the diagnosis rarely does. These misses weren’t a result of creative mistakes or bad luck. They were expensive games built without a clear answer to a basic question: Who, exactly, is this for? That question has always mattered. What’s changed is the cost of getting it wrong. Gaming is a creative industry, which means swings and misses come with the territory. But these days, the biggest misses are the games that tried to be everything to everyone. For years, spreading bets looked like prudent diversification. Two converging pressures have since turned the unfocused game into one of the most expensive lines on the balance sheet. The first is demand. This report’s previous chapter showed that the average gamer no longer exists. Game supply is effectively unlimited, tastes have split into factions that want opposite things, and spending has pooled in a narrow, identifiable set of players. Skyrocketing supply hasn’t scattered players—it has concentrated them. Gamers, especially younger ones, now spend their time on a much narrower set of games than in the past. The most popular live-service, platform-style games, particularly Roblox, have become the center of gravity for the entire gaming ecosystem over the past five years. Players’ preferences for their next purchase confirm how habits have hardened, making the unfocused game a risky bet. According to Bain’s 2026 survey of more than 5,300 gamers worldwide, two-thirds want more of what they already have: a sequel to a franchise they love, a game much like their current favorites, or no new game at all. Only one player in five is after something genuinely different (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
No one is satisfied by the game in the unfocused middle: too generic to deliver the depth the majority want, too safe to provide the novelty others chase, too shallow to pull time back from the giants. The second pressure on unfocused games is AI, and the prevailing instinct here is exactly wrong. The natural assumption is that cheaper production should make the mid-budget game viable again—lower the cost base, lower the stakes, unlock more bets. The opposite is closer to the truth. AI is an accelerant, not a rescue. Without a clear target player, it doesn’t lower your risk; it lets you scale the wrong bet faster. All of this is forcing a reckoning. The developers that come out ahead over the next several years won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated AI capabilities. They’ll be the ones that commit—earlier than their competitors—to building for a player they can describe in a single sentence. Focus or failThe industry generates plenty of coverage about unfocused, trend-chasing titles that missed, but it’s harder to gauge how systemic the pattern truly is. To get a rough read, Bain scanned publicly available data on 100 titles released since 2023. Classifying games as focused or unfocused required judgment calls, and data on commercial failures is far less accessible than data on successes. Even with those caveats, the analysis points in the same direction as the thesis: 83% of focused games in our sample achieved commercial success, compared with 50% of unfocused ones. Consider Baldur’s Gate 3 and Concord, two bets placed around the same time, at comparable scale. The first game’s developers built it for a highly specific target: the deep-lore, long-session, role-playing gamer who had grown up on the Baldur’s Gate and Divinity series. They delivered something that community had waited for years to arrive. The game was a smash hit, reportedly selling more than 20 million copies and generating $657 million on Steam in 2023, by far the platform’s best seller that year. Meanwhile, Concord shipped into a crowded hero-shooter market and had trouble convincing players already invested in free-to-play games such as Overwatch or Valorant to make the $40 purchase. Some studios have caught themselves before the mistake compounds, shelving games when it became clear that the players weren’t going to come—even if that realization came late in development. Canceling a game that far along is a significant sunk cost. Shipping it would have been more painful. Jagex demonstrates how narrowing focus on core players can strengthen the business. In recent years, the UK-based studio behind RuneScape has divested some acquired studios, streamlined its project slate in part due to player feedback, and rebranded itself “Jagex: The RuneScape Company.” Responding to community feedback on its flagship game, the company also removed RuneScape’s Treasure Hunter microtransactions system. Jagex has since reported strong player numbers for both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, as well as more than 1 million sales in the first year of its latest offshoot, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. AI accelerates everything, including scaling bad betsAs AI resets game developers’ cost base, focus dictates who the reset rewards. A studio that knows who it builds for can reinvest freed margin into depth its target audience will pay for. AI’s benefits compound with focus; the clearer the target, the more precisely these tools can be aimed. Studios that don’t narrow their focus have simply made the wrong bet cheaper to place—and faster to lose. For a studio that already knows its target player, AI helps on multiple fronts. The most obvious is development speed: faster prototyping, cheaper iteration, and more rapid delivery of data and insights from real users. But it’s not just about velocity; AI can also help developers more deeply understand their players. A growing set of tools can analyze engagement patterns, surface what’s resonating with a target audience, and enable more effective feedback loops between developer and player community. Crucially, players are growing more open to this shift. In Bain’s 2026 survey, 42% of players say they’re more comfortable with the industry using AI than they were a year ago, 44% feel the same, and fewer than one in seven are less comfortable. Among players ages 13 to 17, the signal is even clearer: 59% feel more comfortable this year, and another 33% say their feelings are unchanged (see Figure 2).
Figure 2
Note: Values are rounded Source: Bain Media Consumption Survey, June 2026 (gamers n=5,339)For studios worried that AI adoption carries reputational risk with their player base, this data suggests the window to move is open, particularly with the audiences who will define the market over the next decade. The studios that will capture the AI margin benefit aren’t necessarily the ones with the largest compute budgets. They’re the ones that know what they’re optimizing for—and that use faster iteration to get closer to a defined player. Implications for gaming executivesIn this market, the most successful portfolios will have a clear focus, with AI aligned to that focus. Three moves get a company there. Kill unfocused games before the next budget cycle. For a large publisher, this is portfolio triage across an existing slate. For a mid-market studio, it’s existential. A game’s greenlight decision is the last cheap exit before sunk costs become irreversible. The discipline required is different, but the urgency is the same. Rebuild the focused portfolio on an AI-reset cost base. This is a top-down, organization-wide capability deployment, not simply handing API keys to individual developers and calling it good. Studios with strong technological capabilities and deep pockets can build AI tools in-house. Most mid-market firms should buy or partner; defending a compute position at spot prices against a better-capitalized competitor is a losing hand. Invest in your target player. Just as in other industries, focusing on the core customer can enable gaming companies to maximize value creation. It may sound obvious, but the studios that pull ahead will back their conviction with capital to match. They’ll concentrate development resources, marketing spending, and AI investment on deepening the experience for their core player. For large publishers, the harder discipline isn’t the initial portfolio triage; it’s resisting the pull to reinvest freed capital into new unfocused bets. For mid-market companies, the stakes are higher; focused strategy needs to be explicit enough to govern every greenlight decision, every hire, and every partnership decision going forward. Read our 2026 Gaming ReportExplore more |