Neuromarketing and the Gaming Consumer: What 54 Studies Reveal About Attention, Emotion, and Memory in Player Retention

Video games have quietly become the largest entertainment industry on Earth, outpacing cinema and music combined in annual revenue, and the battle for player attention has grown correspondingly fierce. Into this competitive arena, companies are increasingly deploying a toolbox borrowed from cognitive neuroscience: neuromarketing, the practice of measuring attention, emotion, and memory through physiological signals to understand what consumers respond to beneath the level of conscious reporting. A new systematic review published in Frontiers in Neuroergonomics now offers the most comprehensive map to date of how these techniques intersect with digital marketing in the gaming sector, and its conclusions are both promising and cautionary.

The review, conducted by Sandra Jimenez-Duarte and Guillermo Castilla-Cebrian of Universidad Europea de Madrid, followed the PRISMA 2020 reporting protocol and synthesized 54 studies published between 2009 and 2025. The authors searched three bibliographic databases—Web of Science, Scopus, and the Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection—yielding 1,332 records, which were reduced to 1,028 after deduplication and then screened down to the final sample, supplemented by citation tracking to capture neuromarketing literature that standard database queries missed. Two reviewers independently appraised each study for risk of bias using instruments matched to study design, including AMSTAR 2, Joanna Briggs Institute checklists, and the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme tool. Inter-rater agreement on screening was high, with a Cohen’s kappa of 0.82.

The resulting corpus was dominated by quantitative empirical work, which accounted for 64.8 percent of studies, with mixed-method and theoretical papers making up 25.9 percent and qualitative research 9.3 percent. Slightly more than half of the studies—51.9 percent—were rated high quality. Publication output accelerated markedly from 2019 onward, with 63 percent of the included work appearing between 2020 and 2024, a trend the authors attribute to the post-pandemic intensification of digital gaming and the maturation of social media as both a marketing channel and a research context. Geographically, however, the evidence base is strikingly narrow: China and the United States lead the national counts, followed by India and Taiwan, while the Middle East and Africa are entirely absent from the literature.

Two complementary measurement streams emerged from the analysis. The first comprises behavioral and self-report approaches, quantifying attitudes, loyalty, and stated intentions through surveys and experiments. The second encompasses physiological and neuromarketing methods—electroencephalography, eye-tracking, pupillometry, galvanic skin response, and facial coding—designed to capture implicit processes that questionnaires cannot reach. The authors are careful to delineate what each technique actually measures. EEG records scalp electrical activity from which attention and affective states are inferred, but with limited spatial resolution and sensitivity to movement artifacts. Eye-tracking reveals where gaze lands but says nothing by itself about preference. Electrodermal activity indexes arousal intensity but not whether that arousal is positive or negative. Facial coding, meanwhile, is vulnerable to cultural display rules and the imperfect match between expressed and felt emotion. Convergent, multi-method evidence, they argue, is far more informative than any single index.

Across the synthesized studies, implicit indices of attention allocation, affective response, and memory encoding were consistently associated with engagement and with antecedents of player retention, often beyond what self-report measures captured. Studies reporting attention and engagement outcomes more frequently favored neuromarketing-informed approaches over conventional alternatives. Yet the authors deliver a crucial caveat: this evidence is largely associational, not based on direct head-to-head comparisons with traditional campaigns, and the reported effect magnitudes varied too widely to pool statistically. The review therefore relied on structured tabulation and direction-of-effect summaries rather than a meta-analysis, and the direction of findings proved predominantly positive but unevenly distributed, clustering in engagement, trust, and purchase intention while remaining sparse for memory, arousal, and retention itself.

Where the evidence does converge is on a set of design and relationship factors linked to sustained play. Visual congruence between marketing stimuli and surrounding content reliably predicted engagement and recall: experiments showed that pictorial logos embedded in games attracted more attention and fostered spontaneous recall, whereas textual brand names better supported recognition. Narrative and emotional design emerged as powerful levers, with advergames generating stronger engagement than passive in-game advertising when story congruence was high. Parasocial relationships with influencers and streamers fostered trust transfer, in which credibility attached to a person generalized to the endorsed product, though research on adolescents showed that parental mediation could attenuate these effects. Community co-creation and transmedia storytelling transformed passive consumers into prosumers whose emotional bonds to game worlds deepened over time, and algorithmic personalization increasingly tailored experiences to individual behavioral profiles.

Among the most striking findings in the review is a rare field experiment conducted within a freemium mobile game, in which personalized difficulty reduction was randomized among 329,999 low-activity players over 50 days. Easing difficulty reduced immediate in-round purchasing—players bought fewer advantages when the game demanded less of them—but it increased engagement and retention, and through them total spending, yielding a net gain of roughly seven to eight cents per user over 30 days. The result challenges the conventional assumption that free-to-play access and paid conversion are locked in tension, suggesting instead that adaptive product design can serve as a form of marketing intervention that resolves the conflict from within the game itself.

This kind of intervention, however, raises what the authors identify as a qualitatively new ethical problem. They draw a sharp distinction between static neuromarketing measurement—discrete, laboratory-based assessment of responses to fixed stimuli—and dynamic, neuromarketing-informed design, in which game mechanics adapt in real time to individual behavioral data without explicit player awareness. Such systems alter spending through changes in engagement and retention rather than through direct persuasion, a pathway players are unlikely to perceive and existing regulatory frameworks were not built to address. The review points to documented risks of deceptive design eroding player motivation, the vulnerability of young and highly immersed audiences, and concerns raised in the neuroethics literature about ‘neuroexploitation’ when neuroscientific tools are applied commercially without informed consent or respect for consumer autonomy.

The methodological limitations of the field temper its practical promise. The overwhelming majority of studies employed cross-sectional or short-horizon designs, meaning that claims about emotional retention rest on immediate post-exposure measures rather than sustained behavioral change; only a small minority of studies in the retention category actually tracked player behavior over time. Laboratory applications of EEG and eye-tracking, while internally rigorous, diverge substantially from real gaming sessions, which are interrupted, multi-screen, and socially embedded. The authors conclude that neuromarketing measures yield reliable insight into immediate attention and engagement, but that their capacity to enhance long-term player retention is not yet established. What is needed, they argue, is a new generation of longitudinal, ecologically valid, gaming-specific research—extending into Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, where gaming markets are growing fastest—governed by ethical frameworks that treat biometric data and player autonomy as constraints as fundamental as any effect size.

Subject of Research: A systematic review of neuromarketing methods and digital marketing strategies measuring attention, emotion, and memory in video game player engagement and retention.

Article Title: Neuromarketing and the gaming consumer: a systematic review of attention, emotion, and memory in player engagement and retention

Article References: Jimenez-Duarte, S., & Castilla-Cebrian, G. (2026). Neuromarketing and the gaming consumer: a systematic review of attention, emotion, and memory in player engagement and retention. Frontiers in Neuroergonomics, 7, Article 1918889. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnrgo.2026.1918889

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnrgo.2026.1918889

Keywords: neuromarketing, video games, player retention, EEG, eye-tracking, consumer neuroscience, engagement, digital marketing, PRISMA, systematic review, ethics, biometric data