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I don't know why but I find language like this incredibly frustrating. Maybe it's because the media tends to do this sort of thing all the time to fit statistics to their narrative.

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The other thing is abuse of percentages. "Only 5% of US population has ever finished a video game." (which is a staggering 16 million people). This type of thing.

Instead of focusing on folks who actually do invest time into your product, even if the % is low.

I think because the “true” statement is more awkward as a headline, and requires more seconds to parse. Thus they need to dumb it down.

The real headline would be “Most games people buy are never played” or something. Which can mean a lot of things like do people often buy games that nobody else has ever played?

Welcome to syntactic ambiguity. But I think this was clear enough to infer what it meant before the rephrase (aside from some edge cases like how does this play with gifts and family sharing).

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