If you still picture “gamers” as a niche group with headsets and energy drinks, this next part may feel surprising. The people you call “your audience” in every deck? Most of them are already gamers—they just don’t label themselves that way.

Open a puzzle app before bed. Playa quick game while you wait for coffee. Clear a couple of levels between meetings. That is gaming. It feels casual and ordinary, so we underestimate it. That is how a lot of brands end up treating gaming as a side channel,when in reality, the metrics show it’s already a go-to for audiences. 

The simplest place to start is reach. The Digital 2024 Global Overview report from Meltwater and We are Social, based on GWI’s global panel, shows that 83 percent of internet users aged sixteen to sixty-four play video games on at least one device.

Eight out of ten online adults is not a niche. It is a majority.

We can go deeper. In a  2024: State of Gaming Report, Dentsu estimates the global gamer base at more than 3.4 billion people. The same piece highlights that for Gen Z, gaming is a given. More than ninety percent of Gen Z internet users play games regularly, and Millennials are close behind.

So “gamer” no longer describes a narrow subculture.It includes most connected people under forty—and a surprisingly big portion of everyone else. The controller, most of the time, is a phone.

That scale is easier to feel when you put it next to things marketers already accept as mainstream. Platforms nobody argues about: TikTok. Snapchat. X. Pinterest.

Statusbrew’s 2025 social media statistics compile monthly active user counts from DataReportal and Statista.

Roughly speaking:

• TikTok sits at about 1.69 billion monthly users

• Snapchat around 850 million

• X (Twitter) roughly 590 million

• Pinterest about 522 million

All four are huge. Nobody calls TikTok a niche. Yet the global gamer population is more than 3.4 billion. If TikTok is automatically “mainstream” at 1.69 billion, then an audience more than twice that sizeisn't an experiment—it’s essential. Calling gaming a niche isn’t just inaccurate—it’s a strategic habit stuck in the past.

Reach is only half the story. The other half is where people actually spend their time during the day. For a long time, TV was the easy answer. Reliable reach. Familiar metrics. A safe choice. It still matters in many plans, especially for older demos and specific events, but the center of gravity has moved.

In early 2025, The Guardian reported on the IPA TouchPoints survey and highlighted a simple but important shift. Adults in Great Britain now spend more time each day on their mobile phones than watching traditional TV. On average, they spend about three hours and twenty one minutes on mobile, versus three hours and sixteen minutes on conventional TV. For under twenty fours, the difference is starker: close to five hours a day on phones, and less than two hours with traditional TV.

The UK is one market, but it illustrates a global direction. The main screen in people’s lives is now the smartphone. They pick it up in the morning, at lunch, during commutes, on the sofa at night. Short bursts. Many times. And in between chats, emails and feeds, they play games. Small sessions that stack up.

This is what makes mobile gaming interesting as media, not just as culture. It is large in reach, but it is also distributed across the day. It lives on the same device where people search, compare and buy. And in those short sessions, attention behaves differently. When you play, your hands and eyes are on the task. For a few seconds, you are not half-watching something in the background. You are actually doing something.

So why do gaming budgets, for many brands, still look like side projects?

Some of it comes from outdated ideas that just stuck around. If “gamer” still makes you think of a teenage boy on a console, it’s easy to treat gaming as a youth-focused pastime—or as something to tackle “later.” There’s also a fear of complexity. Teams imagine they need huge custom builds, or that bringing a brand into games is slow and expensive. The truth? It’s simpler, faster, and more accessible than you think. Most impact comes from simple, respectful formats: rewarded videos where a few seconds of attention feels like a fair trade, short playables that show what a product can do, or in-game placements that blend naturally into the world.

Gross Rating Points and social reach feel familiar, while gaming still feels new. But mobile gaming usually sits much closer to the actions you care about. Someone sees an ad and, with a tap or two, can open a store locator, a product page, a sign-up form, or even a wallet. You can track what happens after the impression—and accelerate your insights.

None of this means you should throw out TV or stop investing in social. It just means that treating gaming as an “extra line if there is budget left” no longer makes sense. When more than four out of five online adults play, and when mobile has overtaken TV in daily time for many people, skipping gaming isn’t neutral. It’s a choice—and it matters.

You do not have to rebuild your plan from zero. A good first step is to update the questions you ask. Instead of “should we be in gaming?” try “how many of our buyers probably play something every week?” and “where in our current plan do we meet them in that mindset?” Stay calm. Focus on a clear goal. Seek a fair exchange. If the answer is “nowhere,” you’ve found the opportunity.

From there, it’s about testing with intention instead of guessing. Pick a specific audience or product. Run well-made gaming formats alongside one or two channels you already trust. Keep the creative consistent so you’re comparing fairly. Then look at cost per attentive second, brand lift, and simple actions like site visits or add to cart. Let the data tell you whether gaming behaves like a niche or like a mainstream channel you simply hadn’t been treating that way.

If the sources you already trust are telling you that mobile is the primary screen, that social platforms with one billion users are considered standard, and that gaming is bigger than most of them, then the “small gamer audience” story stops being a myth. It becomes a blind spot in how you allocate budget and attention.

At some point, the question shifts. It is no longer “should we invest in gaming?” It becomes “what is the smartest way for our brand to show up there?”

At Admazing, we work from that starting point. We assume your customers are already playing, and we focus on how to meet them in a way that feels natural. Our Admazing Games IQ technology helps identify the right games and the right moments for your audience, then we build native rewarded, playable and in-game experiences that people choose to engage with. We keep inventory curated and brand-safe, and we measure what matters, from attention and recall to the real actions that follow. If you are ready to treat mobile gaming as the mainstream channel it already is, we can help you turn that reach into outcomes your business can see.