In-Game Spending Among Teenagers: What a Study of 2,300 Austrian Students Found

A study examined in-game spending among 2,308 Austrian students aged 10 to 19, looking at how that spending relates to gaming disorder, gambling disorder, and socioeconomic status. The findings challenge some common assumptions about who spends heavily on games, and raise questions about whether current regulatory approaches are targeting the right things.

The spending distribution

Of the 2,308 students surveyed, 818 reported spending money on in-game purchases in the past 12 months. Within that group, the distribution was highly unequal. The top 10% of spenders, 85 students spending between €400 and €12,000 per year, accounted for €85,386 of the €138,953 total collected from the group. That is 61% of all spending concentrated in one tenth of the spending population.

The researchers refer to this group as heavy spenders, also known as “whales”, a term borrowed from the gambling industry to describe its biggest spenders.

Who the heavy spenders are

The study found that family wealth did not predict heavy spending. Heavy spenders and casual spenders showed no significant difference in socioeconomic status, which directly challenges the intuition that high in-game spending is a luxury behaviour concentrated among wealthier households.

What did predict heavy-spender status was gender, age, and gaming disorder scores. Boys spent significantly more than girls on average, €180.9 versus €101.8. Spending peaked among 15 and 16 year olds rather than among older teenagers who might be expected to have more disposable income. The researchers interpret this as reflecting a developmental window when gaming is most central to peer culture and identity formation.

One finding deserves particular attention. Adolescents with a migration background were overrepresented among heavy spenders. They made up 32.9% of heavy spenders compared to 21.4% of the general population in the study, despite scoring significantly lower on measures of family financial security. The authors suggest gaming may offer a sense of social belonging for marginalised young people, while simultaneously exposing them to elevated financial risk.

The disorder link

The study found clear associations between heavy spending and both gaming disorder and gambling disorder.

Gaming disorder prevalence was 14.1% among heavy spenders compared to 4.2% among casual spenders. Participants meeting gaming disorder criteria were 5.3% of the spending group but accounted for 10.3% of total expenditure. Gambling disorder was only assessed among the 103 participants who reported past-year gambling; within that subsample, 31.1% met criteria for probable gambling disorder, and this group accounted for 14.7% of total expenditure.

The association between heavy spending and problematic engagement held across all types of in-game purchases, not just loot boxes. That finding sets up the study's central policy argument.

What current regulation misses

Belgium classified loot boxes as gambling in 2018. The Netherlands has been moving toward a similar ban. But the study notes that more than 80% of Belgium's highest-grossing apps still offer loot boxes, suggesting enforcement has been weak even where the legal framework exists.

More fundamentally, the researchers argue that concentrating regulation on randomised reward mechanics may be too narrow a target. The spending and disorder associations they found were not confined to loot boxes. They appeared across all forms of in-game monetisation, including direct purchases, battle passes, cosmetic items, and other mechanics that do not involve randomised outcomes.

The authors call for a broader set of policy responses: expenditure transparency tools that give players and parents visibility into cumulative spending, optional or age-appropriate spending limits, and restrictions on particularly persuasive monetisation features, explicitly naming dark patterns in video games as an area that warrants regulatory attention.

They also note that the research itself is constrained by the available data. Self-reported spending figures are subject to recall bias, and the authors suggest heavy spenders are likely to underestimate their own expenditure. Effective policy would benefit from independent researcher access to industry transaction data, which is currently not available.

What this means in practice

The study does not argue that all in-game spending is harmful or that games are inherently problematic. What it does show is that a small group of young people, often not the wealthiest, are spending at levels that correlate strongly with disorder, and that the design mechanics driving that spending extend well beyond loot boxes.

The dark patterns the authors reference, persuasive monetisation features designed to encourage repeated spending, are detectable. Fairpatterns identifies these patterns automatically across games and platforms, mapping where monetisation design creates the conditions the study describes.

Link to source: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1867460/full