Maybe on bad triple A games
Steam’s indie games tho, gen Z are spending a shit ton there
Gen X, can’t actually remember the last time I bought a game.
Suikoden 1 & 2 on PS5? I think that was it.
I used to buy games all the time, but I won’t pay for a digital release I don’t own. Avowed? Digital only. Looked for Expedition 33, couldn’t find it on physical.
I’m not leaving gaming, gaming is leaving me.
Oh gee! I wonder why is this happening?!
I guess we’ll never know!
Anyway, let’s release another copy-paste game at 90€/$ with 50€/$ in dlcs and another collector edition with some plastic toy for 300!
A collectors edition that doesn’t include the game either.
But it does have a moldy nylon bag!
I knew there was a reason I kept this photo around.
And all the advertising will show the game next to a canvas bag.
Someone downvoted because they don’t want to remember Bethesda’s shenanigans?
Ah nah that’s just because I make it my mission to piss off tankies. You’ll see downvotes on all kinds of comments like “Human Rights should be upheld”, “Cake is always welcome”, or “Google shouldn’t own an advertisement monopoly” not because they oppose the message but because they regularly go through my comment history. (And tankies also do kind of oppose those messages sometimes).
It’s for your own good. This way you can purchase the game separately and we keep the collector edition at a reasonable price tag.
This criticism is genuinely like 10-13 years out of date, gramps.
And yet here we are, with games more expensive than 10 years ago and people spending less than 10 years ago. Seems strange, right?
At least 10 years ago there were some interesting AAA games, even with those problems. Now they they charge that shit for remasters and rehashes.
Hasn’t been a non indie game I was excited about in years.
Yes, but today’s industry problems are way different than collector’s editions with that, of anything that feels quaint enough to peak my curiousity
Collectors editions don’t even include physical items anymore. At least you got something cool to keep. Now it’s some worthless download you get once and never again.
I still have those cheap night vision goggles from one of the Call of Duty editions. They’re subpar quality but still pretty cool.
90€ + 50€ • DLC? Isn’t that too little for the poor record-profit industry titans with budgets in the billions and nonsensical brand loyalty all over the world?
originally i was going to get the first swsh in the generation plus a switch at the time, no thank you, based on how the game came out and what the company, gamefreak said will happen to the future games. 300-400$ switch, +60+15 dlc+ nintendo related services, and storage.(im underestimating some of the costs)
We need to keep the games affordable so they can spend some money in the microtransaction hell that is our store and that is basically mandatory if you want to keep up the pace with the other players in the pvp mode of the game (the only one available, because we removed local modes since we believe that playing with friends
doesn’t make you want to spend on lootboxesis not as fun as playing with randos
Don’t forget to delete last year’s version from all your customers’ hard drives!
Look: we just removed the game from your account so you can purchase the new one without regrets!
Not just Gen Z lol. People don’t have money, games are a luxury, luxuries are the first to go when you need to stretch your cash. Not that complicated.
But then how can you create an artificial divide and pit one generation against another?
Also modern games are trash, that’s kind of a big one you are missing
I have money for games…but NONE of it is going to any company that makes me scream AAAAA…or when they charge 40+ for a game. screw em.
even their 100$ trash at 95% off…hell no. that’s even worse cause you know the game is extra shit.
all my money goes directly to Indy devs. games are actually fun, made with passion and they don’t try to screw me every chance they get. I stopped with big title garbage like 6-7 years ago. never going back.
this mentality even applies to all my shopping. I don’t buy crap anymore and I wish more people would do the same.
They’re spending their time scrolling. The GenZ equivalent of television. GenZ is also getting older. The median age is over college graduate age. They’re simply working more or doing other things besides video games. Not everyone is a Paradox gamer. I’m sure the GenZ Paradox gamers, PC gamers, and FPS/sports enthusiasts are all still buying the same games. But the people growing out of it might buy 1-2 per year and play ~10 hrs per month. The “youngest GenZ” is about 13 years old now.
Exactly.
The Internet forgets it constantly and shitty slop farms like modern day vice love to ignore it:
Call of Duty isn’t just competing with Fortnite. They are both competing with Andor and the NFL and mr beast and Subway Surfers and so forth. Also dating but genz is extra genz about that.
Its a tale as old as time itself. Once you have disposable income you have responsibilities. Some people insist “games aren’t as good as they used to be because I didn’t spend 500 hours playing Final Fantasy 29 over and over again”. Others are unable to respond because they slept wrong and tweaked their neck.
Other outlets (including both Aftermath and Remap which are ACTUALLY the gaming news parts of the good vice…) have talked about this ad nauseum. Kids, generally, aren’t buying even 50 dollar games. They are playing f2p shit on their phones or playing fortnite or roblocks which are also both f2p games. And the spending for those is generally not tracked alongside the GTAs and the like.
Like, we all shit on Sony for their horrific mismanagement and their quest for a live service game (and cheer that they aren’t as bad as microsoft, I guess?). But… there is a reason for that. That might not be what us olds want to play (I actually like some live service games but whatever…). It is more conducive to what people who still have time to spend money on gaming want. Which is ALSO why there is such a big push for “collector’s editions” and “limited re-releases” so that the olds who don’t have time to play will still buy a 200 dollar cartridge they’ll never use.
I’m not a gaming stats expert but if they don’t track the mobile and f2p game spend with the general gaming spend, then that’s kind of a bogus stat to draw the article’s conclusion from. Most “mobile gaming” people I know spend more money on those games than I do on Steam with an incredibly long backlog of games I’ll never play.
Setting aside how unusual it is for overall spend to decrease in this age cohort (I encourage people to read the WSJ report linked in this article), this is the only comment here that hits on the most newsworthy part of this. Video games have been recession-resistant for decades, but now we’re seeing it as a leading category for cutbacks. Even though gaming is a low-cost hobby, zoomers have found alternatives, and that surely includes F2P games.
While trends haven’t been great for a while now, this is the most alarming data I’ve seen yet for the traditional gaming market. I feel like I’m gonna blink and there’s going to be a generational divide like there is with baseball.
I’ve been living under a rock. What happened to baseball?
It’s not very popular with the younger generations (possibly because it is viewed as -extremely- boring). It’s been bleeding fans slowly but steadily foe at least a decade now.
That’s interesting, because it’s no more boring than it was 20 years ago. It is, however, like most sports, tied up in bullshit exclusivity contracts. From my perspective, all of sports has a problem with gambling advertising and with making it annoying to just watch the sport in the first place. If a certain game isn’t exclusive to Apple TV or Amazon, then you still have to deal with your local team’s games getting blacked out for 90 minutes after it aired live if you bought the league’s streaming package for $150 per year.
Maybe baseball isn’t boring, and their business model is teaching people like me to stop watching. I watch fighting games instead now.
It’s possible there are multiple influences at play here. I’m certainly not disagreeing with you, you make some very good points about accessibility of content. And I’m also of the opinion that baseball is deeply uninteresting to watch. I can understand how someone could be into it (much as with any other hobby I don’t partake in), I just personally find it only marginally less dull than a seminar on comparative accounting practices (read: a great deal less dull than cricket).
I think a big part of it is the diversity of entertainment we have available now. If your interests don’t align with what baseball offers, it’s no longer a problem to find something else to occupy your time with. You’re not trapped into a paradigm with five or six sports to choose from, each with a limited season, and many of these new ones you can also engage with directly (gaming, drone racing, CTFs, competitive nerf battles, etc.) which gives you an appreciation for the game that is missing from some professional sports. Take Basketball and Football: both are still quite popular with the younger generations, and both are physically very integrated into american culture. Streetball is about the most accessible sport out there, and every school in the country has a football field (and you can play touch or flag football games in any park)
I suspect it’s the same reason non-american Football (soccer) has maintained such popularity: there is almost no barrier to engagement, even at a non-professional level (you just need a ball, a couple piles of sweatshirts and some friends) and more developed infrastructure for it is incredibly easy to find the world over. Whereas baseball, tennis, jai alai, golf etc. are all unsafe to play in a public setting where there’s a risk of an unaware bystander getting beaned by a small hard ball going 200mph, and require safety equipment that raises the facility cost (and thus barrier to entry) by quite a bit (ex: nets). They still have traction, but if you’re a kid in a shitty suburb or poor town, you’re far more likely to be able to play soccer/football/basketball than you are baseball, and will be able to relate more intimately with those games when watching them played.
(And that’s not to mention esports)
When we’ve got so many choices and so little time to ourselves, why spend it on something we have to compromise our way into enjoying or that is a particular labor for us to be able to consume, thanks to the fragmentation of streaming rights?
One of those ways that people have choices is with multiple competing soccer leagues, is there not? That may explain in and of itself why it does better. Of course, that’s a chicken and egg thing with how much the market can sustain, but there’s no one to keep MLB or the NFL in check. The NFL, I understand, does have a similar generational problem, but that could also be attributed to CTE findings.
Sure, and I imagine that’s a big part of it too. From what I understand all professional sports are having difficulties gaining traction with the Gen Z demographic, but baseball is especially hard-hit (their recent rule changes to try and increase the pace of games may have done something to help with this, I haven’t seen any data about it).
Sports has a problem with advertising full stop. Gen Z is the first generation to really have grown up when ad free streaming was widely available. It has gotten so much harder to stomach the ads as I have gotten less accustomed to tuning them out. As a result I just watch way less live sports than I used to, especially American ones. Now I mostly watch soccer, where I get commercial break free bliss for 45 minutes at a time.
It’s actually less boring now that they use a pitch clock to speed things up. Some people hate it, but I don’t usually want to be stuck at a baseball game for 5 hours because the pitchers are having a bro-off. My team also sucks lol.
You nailed it with the age thing.
Why buy a new game when you have no money and your backlog will take years to go through?
Less money to buy games, cost of games go up, quality still crap, riddled with micro transactions. Why buy a game when it comes out when you can wait to buy it on a sale while you play your backlog and by the time you buy the game it will be the best version because they had time to fix it up, almost never to the degree it should be but still the best it’s going to get
What stands out most from the article is that the 18-24 demographic has a 25% drop off compared to other groups with a 5% drop off.
Not a great sign for the future if cut backs isn’t simply due to deciding to be fiscally responsible, but overall money problems for every day expenses.
Reporter Rachel Wolfe concluded that contributing factors to dropped spending included a difficult job market, student loans, and a particularly high credit card delinquency rate among those aged 18 to 29.
That’s exactly why I love !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works. It pays to be patient.
Thanks for another sub for me to find game deals, much appreciated.
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I also didn’t really buy many games until I had proper salary. 🤷🏻♂️ Some of gen-Z are still pretty young and they are just poor students…
Modern games fucking suck. Start making good shit if you want people to buy them.
Also fuck the useless malware anticheats. Do it server side if you want to be even mildly effective or fuck off.
Playing indie games only until so-called AAA get their shit together, if ever . . .
I miss the the Battlefield 3-4 days for large scale shooters. Everything since has been complete trash. Battlebit is terrible, it’s not even similar.
I’m not going to get that kind of game from an indie developer unfortunately. If it happens I’ll be there.
1942 was the last good battlefield game
What? You don’t want to play another indie rogulile/meta-commentaty rpg? How about a ‘deep’ story that they plagiarized from a kids’ show?
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Do they have money? I don’t have money.
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Modern games from major devs fucking suck.
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My son stopped playing some of the latest stuff because of the crazy levels of anti cheating intrusionware. Better mental health not playing competitive multiplayer too.
The economy is terrible with both hardware and software becoming more expensive, theres a good selection of free and long-lifetime games (be it live-service or just very long and replayable), and a lot of the newer paid games have become worse.
I’d be significantly more suprised if this wasn’t the case.
For people outside of .world (like me):
