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