I love the constant onslaught of articles that are like “people aren’t spending money anymore!!!” Open your damn eyes. We all got smart and refuse to pay $80 (which is now the new forced norm for “AAA” garbage) and are replaying oldies and indies. Hell, I revamped my 3DS and have dumped a ton of games onto it. I can even play some of them online with people again via Pretendo.

Like all of the reasons are so obvious why people aren’t dumping money into this industry anymore. Capitalists fucked it all up and put profit over fun. We’re not all dipshits that fall for the constant micro transactions and grifts.

I legit don’t give a single shit about any of the new “AAA” games coming out. Give me a call when they’re in the bargain bin years from now.

I still play multiplayer, but on games that still support community servers like Minecraft, Enshrouded, Arma 3, Space Engineers..

Who would have thought that if you squeeze out every single penny out of 99% of Americans to pocket them, 99% of Americans would have no penny left to spend?

Some American billionaire probably

I honestly don’t trust any “adult” who’s my age that doesn’t play viddy games,

This is like the modern version of, "Don't trust anyone over 30"

Definitely not true in the case of games.

Its funny that people had more time at home and remote work and the games industry had a massive boost. Now people can barely afford to eat, need to commute hours every day, have the looming threat of being thrown in a concentration camp and maybe even a civil war on the horizon. Why aren't people buying $100 games???

for barely 40 USD of content

This is completely relative, and different for everyone... But I have a hard time backing up statements like this given that it costs nearly $20 to go to the movie theater and watch a 90 minute movie. If I can get like 40-150 hours from a $70 game... That's really not that bad in terms of value. In my opinion.

I think we have been a little bit spoiled (that isn't to say that video game publishers aren't greedy corporations that over charge to increase their profit margins, of course they do and fuck them for it).

How dare they? They should be starving themselves so they can play great art such as Concord.

This is why work/life balance is so important. I wouldn't ever call myself "well-off" but I don't have kids and my job allows me ample time off to play games and watch movies and shit. It's kind of awesome.

I get paid less than I could be, but I don't care about that since it means I don't need to work 70 hours a week and spend the rest of my time sleeping.

Tbf, games were $60 for 30+ years...

The popularity has dipped, but they still have 1,500,000 players per day average and make about $9,000,000 per day. Over 14,000,000 players were on towards the end of last year when they did a juiceworld tribute event.

thieving old ruling class.

Rule by elderly thieves. Klepto-geri-ocracy.

It's funny because like 20 years ago or whenever Xbox launched I was like "why don't they capitalize on the fact that they own windows? The platform everyone plays games on. Why are they competing with themselves?"

Hypothesis: businesses are run by idiots and people whose contradictory incentives create behavior indistinguishable from idiots.

I said in another thread but I've been unemployed for a while now. Even jobs I'm referred to my old coworkers aren't giving me interviews. If capital wants me to spend money, they have to pay me money first. Until then, fuck them.

Depression has me not so interested in playing games anymore. Reading instead. Gaming is losing its magic for me. I’m 36.

People are dumping money still, revenue isn’t shrinking

They were thinking about that back then, various people have said it, but I think they were constrained by costs and technical limitations. Bill Gates certainly wanted Xbox and windows gaming to be a unified platform. I mean look at Valve, they had the Steam Machine ages ago and they flopped, but you can be sure that they will be much popular this time around.

This is why work/life balance is so important. I wouldn’t ever call myself “well-off” but I don’t have kids and my job allows me ample time off to play games and watch movies and shit.

Neither do they! They aren't workaholics, they're home bodies that work the least they can!

It's just that the workplaces are shit. One went back to mandated RTO for no reason even though much of the work is overseas at odd hours. The company's literally trying to make employees miserable so they quit without severence. The other is work-from-home, but with enough pointless meetings and complete workplace dysfunction to eat energy.

And these seem like well above average jobs.

All I can say is: unionize. My position is union (and has been for a very long time so its ingrained into the culture there), and it's difficult to even comprehend the number of ways it has improved working conditions. Literally invaluable. I couldn't work there more than 35 hours a week if I wanted to.