How much reach do branded games really have in Ireland?

Previously we went through the "Digital 2026 Global Overview Report", which encompassed the entire globe. Today we will focus on the statistics from Ireland.

Let's get straight to the point:

98.9% of the population uses the internet, which is massive, and we have more cellular connections than there are people.

What does this mean? Well, no matter who your target demographic is (unless it's people living off-grid), then chances are an internet advertisement or mobile advertisement can reach them!

And if we get into the devices that people in Ireland are using, we can see smartphones, unsurprisingly, are at the top. This chart reflects rather accurately the global device ownership as well, which is great if you want to test out your marketing strategy in Ireland and then expand it globally.

The majority of the population are watching TV, which is a huge difference compared to the global report, where TV was in fourth place. This may be showing us that the Irish market may prefer authentic crafted content.

We are interested in the video game stats, as we are a bit biased. What we see is mobile games are consumed by 52.4% of the internet population, which would be approximately 2.5 million people across Ireland.

TV takes the lead by an astronomical amount! nearly 15 hours a week! higher than the global average by nearly 6 hours! That said, our next slide will show us there is more to the story.

As you can see, even though TV wins by a landslide in hours per week, people are spending most days interacting with social media.

This means that people are more frequently opening social media but aren't sitting down and purposefully going through it.

Mobile games and console games are played for 2 and 1 days, respectively, aligning with the weekend's length, meaning it seems to be more of a luxury media that people use to relax.

We can see here that most people use the internet for information and for staying in touch with family and friends.

Researching products and brands accounts for 52.6% of users, which is a lot!

Gaming is at the bottom of the top 10 reasons, with just 22%, which is still over a million people.

If we look at how these people are accessing the internet, we can see that most use a smartphone.

What stood out to us was the Virtual Reality Device (VR). It's much higher than expected and shows that Ireland has adopted VR more than most countries in the world! According to the Digital 2026 Global Overview Report!

Android takes the lead, and iOS falls short. It's easy to think that iOS should be a priority, as it has a flashier look and feel. But remember that being built for iOS sometimes means compromise for 64% of other smartphone users!

Again, smartphones take the lead. What's interesting to note is that despite previous statistics, 77.1% of internet users in Ireland still do Game! That's over 4 million people!

People mostly use word of mouth as a source of brand discovery. TV ads is then the most popular source that you can leverage as a marketer, which aligns perfectly with how popular tv is!

This page is where we were most surprised. Everything so far has been indicating that games may not work, yet we can see that 10.1% of internet users have interacted with a branded game in the past month. That's more than half the amount of people interacting with a brand's social media page.

What does this mean? that although people aren't online to play games, or people aren't discovering brands via games, they are playing and interacting with them quite a lot!

if we look at the number of clicks traditional social media and banner ads are getting, it's surprisingly low... Games tend to have a 30% (at lowest) click-through rate when players play. So for half the people, we are getting the same amount of clicks. And with an average of $271 spent per user, we are confident that we can make each dollar (or euro in Ireland) count and punch above its weight with branded games.

What does this mean for your brand?

Branded games are a niche in the Irish market. We know that nearly 60% of the Irish internet population are playing games and know how to do so. with 2.5 million people knowing how to scan a QR code, and play a simple game (according to a mix of stats from this report and the Digital 2026 Global Overview Report), it's a great way to support your next activation or help your next marketing campaign stand out!

🚀 Let’s build something 𝘂𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 together.

This article was human-made!

All data comes from the Digital 2026 Ireland by Simon Kemp:

Kemp, S. (2025) Digital 2026: Global Overview Report — DataReportal – Global Digital Insights. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2026-ireland