Gaming is drawing attention away from social media and streaming, and the shift is starting to show up in the numbers. Research from advertising group Dentsu, drawn from its Consumer Navigator study, found that one in four gamers expect to spend less time on social media in future to make more room for gaming, while one in five expect to reduce the time they spend watching streaming television.
Dentsu described the pattern as a rebalancing of attention across entertainment formats rather than straightforward growth in play. The same research found that 70 per cent of UK adults engage in some form of gaming, more than half of them daily, and that 52 per cent of players consider gaming a meaningful part of their identity.
The backdrop is a media landscape that has grown more crowded and more fragmented. Analysis by McKinsey has argued that consumer attention is now split across a widening range of content and devices that are frequently used at the same time. The firm found that 83 per cent of Gen Z consumers and 79 per cent of millennials use several mediums at once while watching streaming video, the same habit that has people scrolling TikTok or Instagram Reels with a show already running.
Casual and browser-based games have settled into that behaviour. Because they load in seconds, require no download and suit short sessions, they fit the fragmented minutes left between other media rather than demanding a dedicated block of time.
That reading is supported by the 2026 State of Web Gaming Report, commissioned by web gaming platform Poki and conducted by the independent agency Atomik Research, which surveyed 2,000 weekly web gamers across the United States and the United Kingdom in May. It found that 90 per cent of respondents multitask while playing, with 56 per cent listening to music, 49 per cent watching shows on Netflix, YouTube or television, 38 per cent using social media and 26 per cent watching livestreams at the same time. Even then, 44 per cent said they still gave the game their primary attention.
The same study points to gaming taking share directly from social platforms. Seven in ten respondents, or 71 per cent, said the amount of time they spend on web games relative to social media is either stable or increasing, with 28 per cent reporting an increase against 22 per cent who reported the opposite. Among the most frequent players, 34 per cent said their gaming time was rising relative to their social media use.
Games have also become carriers of wider popular culture, with cross-branding tie-ins and live music events on platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite pulling in audiences that overlap with streaming and social media.
Market forecasts point in a similar direction. Research and Markets valued the global browser games market at about USD 8.01 billion in 2026, up from USD 7.81 billion a year earlier, and projected it would reach USD 9.07 billion by 2030, with growth tied to ad-supported models and instant-play formats that run across devices.
The convergence is visible in India as well, where the online gaming sector has been described as a driver of the country’s wider digital-economy ambitions, sitting alongside streaming and social video among the formats competing for the same limited hours.
For now, the evidence points to audiences folding several of these formats into the same stretch of downtime, rather than choosing decisively between them.
