Nine out of ten homes in this country have a player in them. Ninety-one percent, to be exact, according to the NZ Plays 2025 report produced by IGEA with Bond University, based on a survey of 820 New Zealand households fielded in April 2025 with a margin of error of 3.5%.

And we’re spending on it. Kiwis put NZ$649 million into games during 2025, a rise of 9% on the year before, according to IGEA’s consumer sales results published in June 2026 using Newzoo figures for digital and mobile alongside Game Sales Data for physical retail.

So this is what we’ll get into: why our particular spending habits make cross-progression more useful here than in most places, how the big platform holders turned it from a favour into a policy, what really carries over between devices when you link an account, and where else that one-login habit has settled in. It reaches well past games, too; a casiny login works on the same principle, giving you the same account and the same progress whether you pick up your phone or sit down at a desktop.

The reason cross-progression stuck has a lot to do with how we spend.

The Spend Split Tells All

Break that NZ$649 million into its parts and something unusual appears. Digital took NZ$267 million, mobile took NZ$246.9 million, and traditional retail still pulled NZ$134.7 million. IGEA credits the Switch 2 launch and continued PS5 spending for the retail result, which means plenty of households brought a new device home inside a single twelve-month stretch.

Look at those first two numbers again. Less than NZ$21 million separates digital from mobile. In most markets, mobile dwarfs everything and cross-save gets bolted onto a console release as a courtesy for phone players. Here the two columns are almost level, and the same people are very likely funding both. That’s the whole argument. When your phone spending and your console spending sit shoulder to shoulder, a save file that refuses to leave one box becomes a daily irritation rather than an abstract complaint.

The player base backs this up. IGEA’s research puts 81% of New Zealanders in the playing category, up from 79% in 2023, with women making up 47% of players and the average age sitting at 36. That’s most of the country playing on whatever screen happens to be free, not a niche group with one machine each.

Operators building for this market have taken the hint. Casiny runs full mobile play with no reduction in game library or functionality compared with desktop, so the account behaves identically whichever device you open it on. Same idea, different corner of the internet.

That flexibility shows up in what we play as much as where we play it; as this look at RPG, FPS and strategy preferences explains, your choice shifts with mood, time and company, which is exactly why a save that only works in one place gets in the way.

Player behaviour explains the demand. Who supplied it is a separate story.

Policy and Not Favour

Cross-progression became a standard the moment it stopped being decided game by game.

The best evidence for how widespread multi-device play has become is a sum you can do yourself. Newzoo’s 2025 global figures count 3,000 million mobile players, 936 million on PC and 645 million on console, against a global total of 3,578 million people playing. Add the platform counts and you reach roughly 4.58 billion. The total is 3.58 billion.

Around a billion people are being counted twice.

That gap is multi-platform play, measured rather than asserted, and it’s a far more honest number than any percentage you’ll see quoted without a source. Publishers looking at that overlap had every reason to make movement between devices painless.

Microsoft went furthest. Jason Ronald, Xbox VP of next generation, disclosed that more than 1,500 titles now support Xbox Play Anywhere, as reported by Game Developer in March 2026. The programme covers Xbox consoles, Windows PCs and Windows 11 handhelds including the ROG Xbox Ally, carrying saves, add-ons and achievements across all of them at no extra cost. That’s catalogue-wide, not title by title.

The commercial case is easy to follow. Newzoo’s Global Gamer Study, published in 2023 using 2022 fieldwork, found players active on three platforms averaged 11.13 hours a week compared with 4.18 hours for people who stuck to one, while the share who paid for something climbed from 57% to 64% to 81% across one, two and three platforms. Worth saying plainly: the numbers gave publishers a reason to be generous. Engagement went up when the save travelled, so the feature paid for itself.

Policy sets the direction. What lands in your account is slightly different, and a bit of technical clarity goes a long way here.

What Travels Best

Crossplay and cross-progression get mixed up constantly, and they’re not the same thing. Crossplay means you can be matched with someone on different hardware. Cross-progression means your save follows your login. A game can offer one without the other, which is why crossplay trackers list the two attributes in separate columns.

Recent examples show how quickly the second one is spreading. Pearl Abyss switched on cross-save for Crimson Desert on 20 July 2026, covering PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Steam and Epic, with linking handled inside the game through a link or QR code. Playground Games has said Forza Horizon 6 will carry progress across Xbox, Windows, Steam and PS5, with the Xbox and PC release dated 19 May 2026, though that one has been announced rather than shipped, so treat it as reported.

Some titles keep things tighter. EA Sports FC 26 syncs Ultimate Team progress within a platform family rather than between rivals, and Nintendo handles saves through Nintendo Switch Online cloud backups with coverage varying by title, rather than running a Play Anywhere equivalent.

Before you sink two hundred hours into anything, four checks will tell you where you stand:

1. If a game asks you to sign into an account that isn’t Steam or Nintendo, that separate account is usually where your save lives.
2. Confirm cross-save and crossplay separately, since one doesn’t guarantee the other.
3. Check whether purchases travel or only progress, because plenty of publishers still tie entitlements to the store that sold them.
4. Link your accounts before starting a long save rather than after, which is much less painful in that order.

Casiny applies the same persistence thinking to its loyalty setup, running lifetime XP across ten levels so progress accumulates permanently and players never drop back down a tier. Whatever you’re logging into, an account that remembers you is worth setting up properly.

Which raises a question worth sitting with. If your last two hundred hours live behind a login rather than under a console lid, what does owning a game mean now?

One Account and Many Screens

Look at how many devices we keep around the house and the answer starts forming. IGEA’s 2023 New Zealand research found 81% of gaming households owned two or more devices for playing, and while that figure predates the current wave, the more recent Australian equivalent from 1,241 households in 2025 shows 74% of homes with at least two gaming-capable devices and nearly half with three or more, alongside 87% console use, 71% smartphone and 58% PC.

Here’s how the features sort out in practice:

Feature	What it means for you	Verified example
Crossplay	Play alongside people on other hardware	Listed separately from cross-save by crossplay trackers
Cross-progression	Your save and unlocks follow the login	Crimson Desert, four storefronts, July 2026
Store-level policy	Progression covered across a whole catalogue	Xbox Play Anywhere
Platform-family sync	Progress moves within one hardware line	EA Sports FC 26 Ultimate Team
Cloud saves	Backup and restore rather than free movement	Nintendo Switch Online, varies by title

Ron Curry, CEO of IGEA, put the household angle well when the NZ Plays 2025 findings landed in September 2025: ‘This year’s research shows that a key driver of New Zealand parents playing video games is to build connections with their children. Video games continue to provide a platform and space where families can enjoy doing something fun together.’

Shared play across shared devices. That’s the pattern the feature was built for, and it’s growing, with Newzoo forecasting 5.3% compound annual growth for New Zealand between 2025 and 2028, a shade ahead of Australia’s 4.8%. Local studios are doing well on it too, clearing NZ$1 billion in annual revenue for the year ending March 2026, two years ahead of target, with full-time roles up 29% to 1,418.

Casiny fits the same expectation, taking NZD directly, carrying more than 5,000 titles including live dealer tables streamed in HD, and listing e-wallet withdrawals between five minutes and two hours. The through-line across all of it is simple. Hardware became a viewing choice, and the thing you own is the login.

Your Save File Is The Console Now

Three things came together here. Our spending spread evenly enough across mobile, digital and retail that locked saves became an obvious annoyance; the platform holders answered with catalogue-wide policy rather than one-off exceptions; and hardware loyalty gave way to account loyalty without anyone declaring it. Nobody announced this as a standard. It turned into one because we stopped putting up with the alternative.

Purchases are the piece still catching up. Progress moves freely in more titles every year while what you’ve bought often stays tied to the store you bought it from, and that gap is the thing worth keeping an eye on over the next couple of releases.

Casiny reflects the same habit we’ve brought everywhere else, with an account that persists, identical libraries on phone and desktop, and progress that keeps counting whenever you come back. Link your accounts early, check cross-save before committing to something long, and stop treating your hardware as a promise you have to keep.

Advisory Notice: Gambling should be treated as a form of entertainment, not a source of income. Set a budget you can afford to lose before you start playing, know your limits in advance, and walk away if you find yourself chasing losses or feeling pushed to keep going.