Forget reach. In gaming, the players worth chasing are the ones already paying, and increasingly, paying developers directly rather than through a platform. That’s the headline finding in Bain & Company’s newly released Gaming Report 2026, and it should be required reading for any CMO or media buyer in the Gulf still treating gaming as a youth-channel line item.
The topline: the industry’s most active 20% of players now account for almost 60% of all playing time, and the top-spending 20% drive nearly three-quarters of total spend. Chasing the “average” gamer, the mass-market play most brands still default to, is, in Bain’s words, now the costliest strategy in the industry.
Saudi Arabia sharpens this thesis. “The ‘average gamer’ hasn’t existed here for a while,” says Farah Choucair, Head of Data and Insights at Webedia Arabia Group, which runs Saudi Gamer, a platform and publication reaching 5.3 million followers. Her team’s own research on what she calls “the generations of Saudi gamers” found millennials make up 46% of the community, the largest single segment, with Gen Z at roughly a quarter. “One of the biggest misconceptions brands still carry is that the average gamer is young,” she says.
That lines up with a data point Bain’s own press release left out of the room: Saudi Arabia ranks second globally, at 28%, for gamers who want open-world, user-generated experiences, behind only Brazil, and well ahead of the US, UK and Japan. Read together with Choucair’s numbers, the picture is a Saudi gaming audience that’s older, more socially driven, and more receptive to co-created, sandbox-style brand experiences than most global marketers assume. Her research found 70% of Saudi gamers prioritize family time and 52% describe themselves as sociable and outgoing, against a global average of 41%, “challenging the old stereotype that gamers are anti-social,” she says. “Playing with friends and family is the top reason both male and female gamers pick up a controller in the first place.”
The spend shift
Bain found that 20% of players drive nearly three-quarters of spend globally. Choucair says the pattern holds locally, almost to the decimal: only 14.5% of Saudi gamers qualify as big spenders, while the rest “spend consciously and within a budget.” Her advice to brands treating gamers as easy money: “That single question sets the tone, are you coming to gamers because they’re one of the biggest, easiest-to-reach spending pockets, or because you actually see them as a cultural force?” The real targeting metric isn’t spend alone, she argues, but cultural weight: “A player with modest spending but high social currency can do more for a brand than a big spender who plays alone.”
From sponsorship to building inside the game
Where Bain’s report stays theoretical about brand strategy, Webedia Arabia has receipts. For Rabea Tea, the agency built Trigger Mug, a traditional Saudi tea ritual reimagined as a gaming-culture object, activated through Twitch personalities and in-game moments, which won Silver at Clio Entertainment 2025. For Almarai, it built Almarai World on Roblox, a farm-to-fridge game for kids that’s logged more than 1.5 million plays and, per Webedia’s survey, moved trust among Saudi mothers to 87%. “This is the shift we’re seeing,” Choucair says. “Brands moving from renting attention in gaming spaces to actually building presence within them.”
The direct-relationship stat, confirmed from the player side
Bain’s most consequential finding for ad budgets is that nearly half of gamers globally now buy directly from developers, bypassing app stores, a shift Bain frames mainly as a margin and data play for publishers. Choucair’s research shows the same appetite from the demand side, and it’s more specific than Bain’s global number: 55% of Saudi gamers say they’re interested in playing Saudi-developed games, but 68% don’t know any exist, and only 20% have actually tried one. “There’s real hunger for something local, something that feels like theirs, and it’s just not reaching them yet,” she says. Asked what would close that gap, her respondents were precise: 44% want Arabic mythology and storytelling in their games, 23% want their own cities and landscapes on screen.
That’s the piece missing from Bain’s global framing of “owning the relationship” as a monetization tactic. In Saudi, Choucair argues, it’s an identity gap waiting to be filled, by developers or by brands willing to invest in something rooted in what players are actually asking for. “That’s not access anymore,” she says. “That’s a relationship.”
For Gulf CMOs and agencies, the takeaway is less “advertise in games”, mind it most already know that, and more that the studios, platforms and, per Webedia’s data, even brands building direct, locally rooted relationships with Saudi players are about to hold the richest first-party data and cultural capital in regional media. The ones treating gamers as a demographic to buy access to will keep renting attention. The ones treating them as a cultural force, the way Choucair describes, are the ones building something that lasts.
