Gen Z Is Cutting Back On Video Game Purchases

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!

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!
A collectors edition that doesn’t include the game either.
- 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.
- But it does have a moldy nylon bag!
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?
- 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 lootboxes~~ is not as fun as playing with randos
- 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)
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.
This criticism is genuinely like 10-13 years out of date, gramps.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?

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.

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.

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.
But then how can you create an artificial divide and pit one generation against another?
even if we do, the cost doesnt justify the poor quality of some of these games.
The article says for other age groups it dropped single digit percent points, so yeah it is mostly Gen Z in this case.
Also modern games are trash, that's kind of a big one you are missing

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.
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?

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.

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?
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.
You nailed it with the age thing.

Do they have money? I don't have money.
Modern games from major devs fucking suck.

From my perspective as a millennial, people are running out of time and energy too.

Like, I know a couple, both working, no kids, avid and techy gamers who know to play stuff like KCDII, yet they mostly plop down for YouTube at the end of the day. A VG or longer form TV is too draining, and too long.

Video games have been my biggest hobbies for basically my entire life, but I barely play them anymore for basically this reason.
For me, I didn’t have the mental energy. At a previous job, I was so mentally strained working 8 hours nonstop on highly mentally taxing tasks that even if I wanted to play a game, it felt like a chore rather than something I can enjoy or wind down to. Even if I had the time, since I do other stuff outside of work.
The strange thing is, when I work I have the money but not the time nor energy to justify buying games to sink time into. When I don’t work I have the time and energy but not the money to justify paying $80-$100 on a game I probably won’t play as much as I think otherwise.
I’ve in recent years looking more into reviews and such to weigh in whether or not I want to buy the game in the first place. Compare that to years prior when I could look at a trailer or short snippet and get a good idea of what the game has to offer. Now I’m more weary of grindy game mechanics and predatory micro transactions.

Yeah. People have no money. Ask one of the billionaires to prop up this failing industry.

Edit: /s

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...

Judging by the comments, reading the article seems to be a lost art. Here's the image for y'all:

It's very specifically about 18-24 year olds, compared to last year, with video games seeing the steepest decrease.

You can stop complaining about games being soulless, unless you want to claim that wasn't a problem last year. Well, you can, but it's unrelated then. Compared to last year, this age group has felt the need to cut back at everything more so than anyone else.

Here's the thread mentioned in the article. Suspected reason is restarting of student loan payments and difficult job market.

Almost like they have no money to spend after rent and food.
We're headed for a crash, and the junior positions are the first ones that CEOs think they can replace with LLMs (they can't but that will take a few years to bite them in the ass)
To be fair, the kids are just a pretty good indicator of where this whole boat is headed. Someone who's been adulting for a while probably has savings and is willing to burn some of those to keep doing the hobby they like, especially when they're invested with hardware or friendships that exist through gaming.

They don’t come out with original work that gets people interested and/or they enshittify the franchise. If GreatGame was good, we’re on GreatGame VI with microtransactions, paid skins, fortnite play, no immersive single player campaign, and ads with no real change to anything else.

Look outside AAA gaming. It‘s never been better.
- Almost. It was better a few months ago before the payment processors started threatening the game platforms

Like others said, it's not just Gen-Z.

Funny enough, the main reason I'm spending far less is not the shitty economy, but rather the gaming industry's push to kill physical copies.

I used to buy a lot of physical games at full price because they would be much harder to find later on, but if I'm forced to go with a digital copy this is no longer an issue, so I just let them sit on my wishlist until they're massively discounted.

Me, looking at my physical stash of games
I OWN them!

there are also almost no new games worth even looking at anymore. There are some, but they are quite rare

In the AAA space, sure

Why buy a new game when you have no money and your backlog will take years to go through?

Y'all, this market is beyond saturated. And the AI gaming people are flOOOoding the space with more and more stuff.

In terms of a fun way to spend an hour or two, or a few go-to games, there's unlimited options, many free or free enough. Meanwhile, everyone churning out titles expects full attention and wishlist and dropping $50 on them for simply existing.

There are also some games with active modding communities that can be played basically forever without getting boring.
- Even without modding I have in the last couple of years found myself mainly in a cycle of playing the same emergent gameplay (were the game-space and/or game characters are random) games, one game at a time until I get bored then the next and the next until eventually I'm not bored of the earlier played games anymore and start it again.
  These are mostly Indie titles like Factorio, Rimworld and even The Lone Dark in free mode.
  The curated experience - which is what most of the AAA stuff is - just doesn't have this infinite replayability.
Feels a bit like the 80s market crash. Too many low quality games flooding market.
I don't really follow current games. Is there actually a huge increase of AI games?

Could it be that the economy fucking sucks?

Nope, clearly it's our fault for not just going out and buying stuff.

Well, gee, I wonder why. Not like their money isn't going more for necessities after all

As a millennial, the games today are mostly shit. I’m currently playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and it’s amazing. I had a blast with DK Bananza as well. Deltarune was nice too. But before that? AstroBot. And before that? I don’t know. Usually I play a demo of a game, if that’s not available I pirate it and play for half an hour or so. If I like it, I buy it. If I don’t like it, I won’t buy it and won’t play any further. And on top of that, a lot of games released today are just remakes of games that themselves released on PS3/Xbox360/PC. I mean "The Last of us remastered"??? That game was released on PS4, so I can just pop it in my PS5 and play it. But now the devs want me to pay $70 to have it a tiny bit better looking?

"Lost Soul Aside" will release later this month. I remember years ago when I first heard of this game, made by a single person (who now got a team of developers from Sony). And I will definitely get that. No demo required.

The games today are not mostly shit. There's so much great stuff that comes out every year that it's difficult to keep up with it all. It's just not usually the stuff that gets the most marketing. As a bonus, the best games of the year rarely ask for that $70 price point. What are you looking for?
- As a person who doesn't care about graphics: New games are mostly shit. I'm allowed to do less (need animation for each action you know?), I must have fewer monsters on the screen (polygon count you know?) takes 35+ GB and it makes my laptop fans go wrooom?
- What good games did come out this year, that’s
  • not stated in my comment
  • not a remake/remaster
If you want a medival semi-sim with amazing Monty-pythonesque writing, check Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
I'm honestly split between it and 33 for my GOTY, they're so different but both so amazing.
- Playing it now, while it does have its comedic moments, it feels like a huge misrepresentation to call it Monty Python-esque.
What a crazy statement. My bottle neck is time not lack of games - there are just too many incredible games there!
- I feel like the big name titles are all headed in a similar direction (realism, large open world, story-driven), because they need to differentiate themselves from the indie titles that cover the other bases for cheaper.
  So, if that direction isn't your jam, I can certainly see that you'd feel that way, because you need to inform yourself more actively to learn about those indies.

The whole world is cutting back on everything everywhere as no one wants to be left short if this global economic craziness gets even more out of hand.

and indie games are cheaper and better

Yeah, why would anyone buy another copy of Mario Kart with minor changes for €80 when there's much better indie games for a quarter or less of that price?

I think SOME of it has to do with AAA being dogshit, but I think a lot of it is actually that they just play roblox. I have been told "why would I buy peak when roblox has this mountain climbing game for free?"

You're thinking of Gen Alpha. GenZ was born starting '97, most of us are closer to 30 than 13, they don't play Roblox or know what that is. All they know is eat hot chip and twerk and cry for a world that never was yet feels was taken from us while watching old vine compilations and being able to recite them word for word with impressive if slightly concerning accuracy.
- Gen Z sure do know about Roblox (as in heard of it).
  It's just that most either play(ed) Minecraft or never were fond of those games in general
- I get what you're saying, and Roblox's grasp definitely gets worse on gen alpha and the younger you get, but that quote in my og comment came from a 26 year old playing with another 26 year old and a 27 year old. Gen Z for sure plays roblox

Did industry try to raise prices even more? Maybe higher prices is what's missing for gaming industry to blossom /s

Games were once created by gamers, who had a clear vision. It since became a soulless business and people notice. I think twice before opening my wallet now. I don't pre-order, don't spend more on digital gimmick editions and wait for reviews, first. Usually I can wait for sales. The industry's problems are homemade. But once in a while I find rare gems like Forgive me Father. And I'm happy with that.

Games were once created by gamers
This is the biggest issue. I tend to focus on Indie games lately. There's the odd bigger game that I'll pay for, but they are few and far between.

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.

Maybe on bad triple A games

Steam's indie games tho, gen Z are spending a shit ton there

Yeah, I remember being in my 20s too. Too bad they are going through the same shit we did. are we getting another "this is a trauma response" generation?

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.

I do buy games from time to time, but 2 of my most played games on Steam are just free games. OpenTTD and vivid/stasis.

Everyone is.

I don't buy new releases anymore.

Why?

Cause the prices are getting stupid. Cause its all digital downloads with no physical product. Cause my "ownership" can be revoked at any time by the platforms whims or the platforms shutdown.

What happened to digital downloads being cheaper, anyway? Thats the promise we were sold 10+ years ago. That by sacrificing physical products, Publishers/Devs wouldnt have to pay for printing, manufacturing, shipping, storage, etc, so they'd be able to sell AAA new releases for 30 dollars, and Pub/Dev would still make more money.

And now we're supposed to be paying 60, 70, 80 dollars or more, for these digital download games.. that we don't even own? And because they have no product on the shelves, prices never come down either. Sure, you might find a sale like on steam or something.. but those sales pale in comparison to what they were 5, 10 years ago

Fuck that. Amazing how the only promise fulfilled on moving to digital download was that pubs/devs would get more money.. and they get that by skyrocketing the costs, not because of the sacrifices we made to give up boxes, disks, manuals, and ownership

My main reason for not buying games is that epic and amazon give them away for free.
I've got a backlog of around 500 games I haven't touched or paid for, so there's plenty to do without paying for anything.
- subscribing to humble monthly is also a good way to amass games on the cheap. not as cheap as free, of course, but still better than most sales.

I keep buying games on sale but I'm just not playing much of my backlog.

I keep going back to a few strategy games and putting even more hours in. The vast majority of my gaming in the past 2 years has been between 3 games.

Ultimate Admiral Dreadnought - Janky, and I have problems with how HE shells are handled in the main mod I play, keep booting it up. 850 hours played.

Star Wars Empire At War. So many amazing mods.

Wartales - game gets stale after a while but it's good enough that after a bit I go back to it to put even more hours in.

I have so many amazing games that when I do play them I love them, but I keep going back to these strategy games. Oh, and a bunch of time on Need For Speed Heat.

I've been spending a bunch on other games, but I'm just not playing them.

people are cutting back on purchases period.

has little to do with culture, quality of games, etc. A lot more to do with the fact that inflation has gone fucking insane.

Then who is? Millions of people are gonna buy the new Call of Duty on release. Who are they?

Kids on consoles with mom's money, those kids that eat up shit like Fortnite and other live-service shovelware.
With how much CoD costs and how the player base tends to abandon the game once the new one releases, Game Pass is pretty much the most logical way of getting your hands on CoD. I reckon most people play it through that.

even milleneals arnt paying it, like myself. not paying for things like switch, or swsh, because they decided to enshittify the console or games, and gouge prices.

I'm not gonna lie, I've spent hundreds. But I'm definitely not buying a switch 2, what a rip off.
- i was almost tempted to get it for the first swsh, glad i dint after listening to masuda"enshittifying speech", we get it you're tired of the franchise, hand it to a company that would make a competent game.

As a old member of Gen Z, i can definitely say the prices aren't helping. A lot of people in my age group just don't work from what i've seen, so with 70$ and sometime 80$ games they aren't going to be buying many. On top of that, and this may just be the people i've exposed myself too, but most of them don't want longer experiences. They'd rather plop down with something like FF14 or Mario Kart and play that over and over and over again. That's not a bad thing, but i definitely think it's not helping. And like i said, this might just be the people i expose myself too.

True, I enjoy games like Spelunky and old arcade racers a lot more. Play for a bit and leave it. No story to worry about.
- I can definitely get that. I like to keep a good few games on hand i can just hop into after a long day, it's nice to be able to kick back with smaller games even if my favorites are always bigger story games.

I sometimes forget GenZ are now adults. Some now do porn.

Well you cant say that without giving some recomendations around here

Why buy new when I have a backlog, the PS1/2 catalog emulated, and can wait 6+ months for a sale

I recently softmodded my ps2 for about $30 (freemcboot memory card and large usb drive) and I've got hundreds of hours of nostalgia driven gameplay ahead of me. It's incredible to think that I have about 40 old, amazing games for less than half the price of a single new AAA game.

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.

The seven seas are way more friendly

oh they are talking about AAA and AAAA games, so then they are not buying/playing fewer games but moved to the indie scene.

Its not that we cant afford them necessarily, its that we cant justify them. The main reason you needed to get the new game was because all your friends were getting it. Only nerds and dweebs and losers play single player games. CoD is where its at bro. When everyone moves to the new game you can lose social time with friends or you can spend another £50. Now that everyone is poor, enough people aren't migrating to the newest shiniest edition immediately and people are playing games they already have.

Couple that with desperately working every opportunity you can every hour and adults just don't game together any more.

Tl;dr they are not feeling the social pressure to buy any more.

Only nerds and dweebs and losers play single player games.
Some people actively avoid multiplayer games to avoid obnoxious, entitled kids.
- Lol, that was great. Thanks!
- you don't want to be told to kill yourself and have children tracking down where you live and threatening to call the police to your house
  you just cant handle the bants
  dweeb confirmed

https://lemmy.world/c/foss_gaming

For people outside of .world (like me):
!foss_gaming@lemmy.world

Just to add a contrasting perspective I feel like it's been an absolute golden age of gaming for me lately personally:

No Man's Sky still getting relatively fun updates. Cyberpunk 2077 was great on launch and arguably much better now.

The Last Of Us Part 2 on PC is incredible and I'm happy that the port exists so I could experience it. You haven't really played the game till you replay it with both protagonists wearing their Hotline Miami shirts in all the cutscenes. PS4 Spider-Man on PC was prolly the best superhero game I've played.

MSFS2020 opened a whole new world of flight sims to me, especially when it comes to doing fun VOR2VOR navigation with littlenavmap charts printed to PDFs and attached in VR, and Assetto Corsa did the same for racing sims.

Speaking of VR, H3VR is stronger than ever. I have many fond memories of VRChat just a few years back.

Victoria 3 has a really fun thriving modding scene. Indie games like Sea Power, Flight of Nova, Stray, Ultrakill, World of Horror, Nuclear Option, Descenders and Crisis In The Kremlin: The Cold War have been a big timesink for me lately as well as classics of indie like Suzerain and actual art masterpiece DEFCON.

It's also been great to go back and play old classics and PS3 emulation now that PC hardware is much cheaper after the crypto/scalper crises circa 2018.

Also, with Steam play and the steam deck, PC Gaming is easier than ever and just hassle-free.

I never played the popular junk so ig to me all this gacha mtx horse armor crap just doesn't really relate.

Buy Indies. Fuck AAA

Aren't we all, fam?

Unsurprisingly. Games have gotten way more expensive and a lot more soulless. Gems like BG3 are a rarity. The recently released "enhanced" edition of Neverwinter Nights 2 is an awful cashgrab and an disappointment after the successful enhanced edition of the first one so I'm just playing through the original release with an unofficial patch again...The only game I'm looking forward to this year is the new Anno and given that Ubisoft has its fingers in it I'm still wary about that one.

I hope they make it abnormal to own a $3000 gaming pc in middleschool again.

I don't even have one that expensive, even now that I earn enough. Anything above $2000 is just going into silly territory where the marginal improvement per dollar increase is weak.
- $2000
  $1000

Live service on console was obvious on the way for every genre back on the 360/PS3 era with FIFA ultimate team and publishers also having that period of time when they were trying to kill used games with that single account multiplayer access code

Then it became super obvious because of PC from the super success of TF2 hats and eventually CSGO skins by like 2015. Trying to compete with WoW was an ocean of dead video game studios. Fortnite perfected live service on consoles and CoD adapted and went just as wild with it

Single player games, my hot take is Mass Effect, Uncharted, and Assassin's Creed killed AAA single player narrative games by succeeding so well to making future games mediocre. Mass Effect had interesting alien species dynamics but never took them with much of any depth. They were Star Wars movies rather than the wild Star Wars EU. Uncharted was a hyper popular Hollywood blockbuster where the emotional highlight being the beginning of Uncharted 4 with Nate and Elena being a cute couple.

Assassin's Creed stories kept going deeper and deeper into name dropping famous figures/mythology that it became parody. Historical clout chasing wrapped together in a nonsense overarching plot that should have had some satisfying ending back in 2012 but instead is effectively spin-offs the series

So Mass Effect hints at interesting politics but plays things safe and gives you none but Hollywood space opera in video games with solid animations and facial animations were fresh in the 360 era. Uncharted was even more extreme in that regards than Mass Effect where there was still novelty in Hollywood mimicry with even better graphics and even more scripted for explosive set pieces. Assassin's Creed and eventually Far Cry and Watch Dogs are bottom feeders. Chase trends, name drop - shotgun approach for trailer fodder. They are sadly the standards of AAA single player narrative

Also live service single player games are competitive. Stories are just as shallow but frequent in release and graphics at a level good enough now. Talking like Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Wuthering Waves

What did James Gunn say about superhero movies? It’s not that the trend is over and people hate these games. It’s that they hate BAD games.

Plus, I’ve been buying plenty of indies that likely don’t feed into these statistics. It’s not even a hipster thing now - a lot of streamers just like playing the newest indie coop like REPO, Peak, Phasmophobia or Lethal Company.

I'm taking the Rossmann route on this, and using a net in order to get games that are no longer on any storefront.

That's what my producer, Neigsendoig, did with WWE 2K19, because it's abandonware now by most standards.

Translation: Gen-Z does not want to buy those godawful AAA games.

I'm only ever buying coop games nowadays. Playing coop is simply the most fun you can have playing games. I'm a Millennial tho, and I do pirate the occasional AAA game.