How much do you reckon you’ve spent on games in your life? A few quid? A few hundred? Absolutely no idea?

That final option was my immediate answer, and probably yours too, so the results of a recent survey by online gaming community GameStrata may shock you. Brace yourselves.

The average gamer will spend more than US$30,500 between the ages of 18 and 48. Yes, thirty thousand dollars. That’s more than £15,000. On video games.

Now that figure covers both games and gaming hardware, and the survey does only encompass a community of dedicated online gamers, but it’s still astonishing when lumped together like that. I could have bought a new car, put a deposit down on a house, or enoyed the holiday of a lifetime. Instead I took Bromley to League One mid-table mediocrity and shot a few pigeons in Liberty City. Depressing, isn’t it.

But it’s easy to see how easily that figure is reached. Over a 30-year period that equates to £500 a year – that may seem a lot, but last year I spent £400 on a console alone, and games now usually come with price tags of £40 each.

But more interesting is the contribution of digital downloads of games and game items in that figure: a massive 85% of respondents to the survey had purchased digital goods in the last month. I’ll hazard a guess I’m not alone in seeing them as cheap little impulse buys that barely register on my monthly bank statement, yet with each costing anything from a few quid to a tenner or more, it’s easy to rack them up without feeling like your overspending.

It’s not clear whether the survey includes PC hardware in that figure (a couple of grand on a PC every few years in the ’90s would have most people nearing the total well before time), but social communities like the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live are apparently making us more comfortable splashing out online.

“With forecasters estimating this year’s sales will reach nearly $23 billion, it’s clear that gaming is the fastest-growing sector in the entertainment industry,” said Barry Dorf, COO of GameStrata. “The best part is that the trend doesn’t show any signs of slowing. In spite of predictions of a sluggish economy, gamers continue to invest their time and money into electronic entertainment.”

As I stand at the counter in Game with my credit card out, I can’t help feeling he’s laughing at me.