Are you more likely to spend money on a game than other software?

I'd guess it comes down to games being entertainment. People also easily pay for a streaming service or two.

Personally I don't play that many games, touching a new one every couple month, and usually only get them when they're on sale on steam or gog, never paying more than about 25€, usually getting older titles for maybe 10. So that might still make it more money per year than for software, but the individual purchase isn't that much and thus easier done.

I don't know if you're counting apps here too, but I collected a couple over the years that were only 1 to maybe 5 bucks, again since this isn't a huge amount of money the decision is easily made.

As for professional software, I don't do photo editing often and professionally enough to justify anything more than gimp, for example. Same would go for video. I write maybe two or three letters a year, so libre office is more than enough.

Games are $60 for entertainment.

Office, work productivity software is $600 - $2500 with the promise of more work that we have to do.

Same reason we'll pay a few K on a vacation but demand our employer pay for flight and hotel for an office visit.

Office software is a commodity at this point. You buy a Mac, it comes with iWork and if you want more you can get an office suite that’s free sw. There’s also Google Docs and I think even office.com is free of charge at this point.

Most games I will happily wait until they’re on sale too.

If I remember will I only paid for a backup software for Windows XP, which I used 2007 to 2008, then I switched to Ubuntu (Debian now.) I can remember if it was subscription based but probably not.

On the other side I paid for a dozen games for PS2.

So yes, I'm about ten times more likely to buy games than other kind of software. But all the other kind of software I need is available for free, so I'm not sure that we can compare the two things.

The paid vs free options for gaming are much different than the paid vs free options for other types of software. I don’t know of any free options for games like Assassin’s Creed. On the other hand, there are viable options that may not be as polished as the paid versions but are good enough for things such as image processing, 3d modeling, etc.