Gamers have been voting with their wallet for years – that's why 82% of US players reportedly made freemium in-game purchases last year

A newly released joint report from marketing, media, and data firm Comscore and in-game advertiser Anzu found that in 2023, 82% of US gamers made in-game purchases in a "freemium" game of some kind, per Games Industry's read of the paywalled report. 

If you'd asked me what this figure would've been, as someone who's been writing about games for over 10 years, I would've guessed it'd be pretty high, but 82% beats even my expectations. There are more, arguably more interesting stats in the report, and this sort of data can only yield a vertical slice of a much larger market. But these aren't throwaway findings, and this US figure speaks to the meteoric rise and enduring popularity of long-tail monetization in games, even as MTX fatigue continually and understandably drives many people to chant, "Vote with your wallet." People have been voting with their wallets; that's how we got here. 

A few recent microtransaction touchstones come to mind. Just this month, Nexon's new looter shooter The First Descendant buckled under an influx of new players. This was more than your average launch day server crunch, however: people were buying so many microtransactions that the servers couldn't keep up. 

In February, as Bandai Namco pushed new paid items to Tekken 8, 30-year Teken veteran Katsuhiro Harada weighed in on the ever-increasing popularity of in-game purchases as a way to keep games in the black long-term. 

"Development costs are now 10 times more expensive than in the 90's and more than double or nearly triple the cost of Tekken 7," Harada reasoned. "Even the Fight Lounge servers are costly to maintain. In the past there weren't so many specs and there wasn't online. Plus they didn't have such high resolution and high definition. Now, so many people want the game to run and be supported for a long time. It costs money to continually update the game for that reason." 

Also in February, Johan Pilestedt, creative director on Helldivers 2, argued that games "have to earn the