Holiday Gifting and Gaming by the Numbers: What Public Data Says

Holiday gift advice is full of confident numbers that nobody can trace. This post does it differently. It uses only public, industry, or academic information we could read at the source, links each number at the point of mention, and says plainly where the evidence stops. Nothing here comes from LFGdating’s own members or business.

What the research says about gifts and relationships

Two academic findings do most of the work in the gifting conversation, and both come with caveats.

• Price and appreciation. In a 2009 paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Francis Flynn and Gabrielle Adams reported across three studies that givers expect more spending to mean more appreciation, but recipients reported no such link. The summaries available to us give no sample sizes or effect sizes.
• Experiences and relationships. Cindy Chan and Cassie Mogilner’s 2017 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research reported in its abstract that experiential gifts strengthened relationships more than material gifts, as judged by recipients. The full paper is paywalled, and we read only the abstract.

A University of Toronto write-up on the Chan and Mogilner work reports that 78% of respondents said their most recent gift was a material gift rather than an experience, and that households spend about 2% of annual income on gifts. Both numbers appear in a university news article, and the article doesn’t print sample sizes or the underlying source for the 2% figure. Treat them as reported, not independently confirmed.

What retail data shows about the last holiday season

The National Retail Federation’s January 2026 release on its CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor reported that holiday sales from November 1 through December 31, 2025 grew 4.1%, against an NRF forecast of 3.7% to 4.2% growth for the period. The same release listed December category changes:

• Sporting goods, hobby, music and book stores: up 5.16% year over year
• Digital products, including e-books and games: up 3.6%
• Electronics and appliances: down 0.09%

A trade-press summary of NRF’s findings adds that a record 202.9 million consumers shopped from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, including 134.9 million online and 129.5 million in stores. Those figures come from that summary, we could not confirm the survey method behind them, and a shopper can be counted in both groups.

What these numbers don’t tell you: how much people spent on partners, how many of those purchases were games, or anything specific to gamers. They are totals and category movements, and the categories are broad.

Gaming context

The Entertainment Software Association’s 2025 report, from a YouGov survey of 5,000 respondents, estimates that 205.1 million Americans play video games, and that 60% of adults play every week. For relationships specifically:

• 55% of players ages 8 to 90 play with others weekly.
• 78% of players believe games can introduce them to new friends and relationships.
• 63% of Gen Z and 49% of millennials say they have met a good friend or significant other through games.

The ESA is the video game industry’s trade association, so these are industry-sponsored survey estimates. The last figure combines friends and significant others, so it can’t tell you how many couples met in games.

How to read these numbers

Three habits help with any gift statistic. First, ask who measured it: a peer-reviewed journal, a trade group, a retailer, or a survey company with a stated method. Second, check the unit: a percentage change in sales is not an average spend per person. Third, notice the population: a survey of shoppers isn’t a survey of couples, and a survey of gamers isn’t a survey of people dating gamers. The numbers above are real, but each one answers a narrower question than the headline suggests.

Claims we looked for and refused to repeat

• “Holiday sales topped $1 trillion in 2025.” NRF’s release refers to “just over $1 trillion” as the forecast reference, but we found no measured dollar total in the release itself. Trade press repeats the trillion-dollar figure, but we’d need NRF’s own measured number, so we are not repeating it as a result.
• “Expensive gifts mean more appreciation.” The research we found points the other way, and we say so above.
• Anything specific to gamers’ gift preferences. None of the studies we cite is specific to gamers or to dating couples. We’ve applied them by analogy, and the guide posts this week say the same.

Declining to repeat a number is not a gap in the post; it’s the policy.

What the data adds up to

Gifting is a big, growing slice of holiday spending, and the best academic evidence we found suggests that price isn’t what recipients respond to, while shared experiences do more for relationships than objects. None of it tells you what your partner wants. For that, read our complete gift guide for a gamer partner, or get the LFGdating app and meet someone to shop for.