Spooky Season by the Numbers: What Public Data Says About Halloween and Gaming

October is when everyone suddenly has a take on fear, games and date night. The take usually arrives with a number attached, and the number usually has no address. So we went looking for the addresses. Below is every Halloween and gaming figure we could trace to a primary source, each linked where it appears, followed by a list of popular claims we refused to repeat. It is all public research and industry survey data. None of it comes from our own members or app.

The baseline: gaming is a mainstream habit

• 212.3 million Americans play video games weekly, up 3% (7.2 million) from 2025, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2026 report.
• 67% of Americans aged 5 to 90 play an hour or more a week.
• The average player is 37.

The fine print: this is the games industry’s own trade group surveying itself. ESA’s data page describes an online YouGov panel survey, fielded February 11 to 25, 2026, with 13,545 respondents weighted to the US population. Adults answered on behalf of their households.

The Halloween side

• Halloween spending is expected to reach $13.5 billion, an average of $115.14 per person, according to the National Retail Federation.
• 74% are planning to celebrate this year, and 50% say they will dress in a costume.

The NRF figures come from a survey of 7,889 consumers conducted September 1 to 9, 2026, with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.1 points, run by Prosper Insights & Analytics. The spending number is a projection built from what people say they plan to do, by a retail trade group.

Two more figures are second-hand, so treat them as unconfirmed. A trade-site write-up says watching scary movies ranks among the top ways to celebrate, at 42%, and attributes it to the same NRF survey. We could not find that line on NRF’s own release. The same write-up reports 29% of all adults plan to throw or attend a party, which it credits to a costume-industry association’s analysis of NRF data. We could not verify that at the source either.

Games and meeting people

These come from ESA’s 2026 data page, and we could only read the page, not the full booklet, so we cannot confirm which group of players each figure is based on.

• 49% say games help them stay connected to friends and family, and 55% say games helped them make lasting memories.
• 37% have met a good friend, spouse or significant other through video games.

That last one is a single combined category: friend, spouse or partner. It is not a “37% met a partner” statistic, and nobody should quote it as one.

Scared on purpose: what researchers actually measured

Almost none of this research involves video games or couples. Most of it happened in haunted houses and amusement parks.

• There is a sweet spot. In a Danish haunted house study of 92 analysed visitors (110 signed up), ages 12 to 57, enjoyment peaked at a middle level of fear. The authors’ phrase is “sweet spot.” It is a pattern across a group, not a promise about any one person, and it held for ratings of specific locations in the attraction, not for visitors’ overall ratings.
• Choosing it matters. In the same study, 56.5% of visitors came by their own choice, and those visitors reported more enjoyment than people who came because others wanted them to.
• Close people sync up. At a haunted house, heart rates synchronized more between socially close pairs than between less close pairs, in a sample of 347 visitors (254 in the heart-rate analysis). It is correlational. It does not show that being scared together creates closeness.
• The roller coaster result has a catch. In a study of 300 amusement park visitors (165 men, 135 women), people who had just ridden rated a stranger’s photo as more attractive than people waiting in line, but only when no romantic partner was present. Participants were not randomly assigned.
• Games specifically: one old, small sample. An Indiana University survey of 269 college students found men played and enjoyed horror games more, with similar reported fright across genders, and interactivity was the most commonly reported cause of fear. It ran in 2013, so it is not a picture of gamers today. The two summaries we read word their headline percentages differently, so we are not quoting them.
• Couples and games: one qualitative study. Interviews with 13 couples (26 people), ages 28 to 42, found shared gaming gave couples memories and rituals, while time pressure and competitive games often caused frustration, and games players could pace themselves helped couples compromise. It measured no relationship outcomes and was not about horror.

Where the evidence runs out

• The bridge study. A famous 1974 study suggested that fear on a wobbly bridge got misread as attraction. A later re-analysis says the evidence is weaker than the legend, and reported sample sizes conflict across sources, so we quote none. We unpack it in Does Fear Make You Fall for Someone?
• How scary is this game? ESRB’s ratings guide lists descriptors for things like blood, gore and violence, but none for fear or jump scares. A Mature rating tells you little about how frightening a game is.

Numbers we refused

• “Horror is the most popular game genre for couples.” Every version traced to content farms or third-party recaps. We found no primary dataset on horror’s share of players at all.
• “Scary movies make first dates go better.” No experiment we found tests it. The nearest evidence is the roller coaster result above, which applied only to people without a partner present, and the bridge study, which is disputed.
• “X% of couples play horror together.” The ESA data page we could read shows placeholder zeros on its play-with-a-spouse tiles. Until someone reads the full booklet, we will not quote one.
• “Couples who game together are happier.” We found no quantitative, peer-reviewed source we could verify. The one couples study above explicitly did not measure it.
• Teen-only gaming data from Pew. The most recent Pew gaming report we found covers teens. Its adult gaming data was too old to present as current. Different group, different question.
• Anything that says “Source: Statista.” That is a pointer to a study, not the study. We link the original or we leave it out.

One last thing

Scary content is not for everybody, and “no thanks” needs no explanation. If horror, or anything else, brings up real distress or panic, that is a conversation for a health care provider. A date is not a treatment.

If you want the practical version of all this, start with our complete guide to horror game date night. And if you are looking for someone to pick a difficulty setting with, the LFGdating app is full of gamers, and you can sign up here.