Video games spending by young Americans is dropping sharply, report suggests
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Make a timeline comparing the rising cost of games, rising unemployment, addition of tariffs on exports from Japan and this. Notice a pattern?
Tariffs would likely have very tiny influence on this statistic since most video game spending nowadays is digital, and digital products are protected from tariffs since tariffs are only attached to physical goods.
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M-Disc
woah woah woah, Mr. Namedrop. What is this, now? 100GB RW Blu-rays? $57 for a pack of 6?
$57 for 600GB
$100 for a 4TB WD Red
the hard drive won't last as long
That implies it's powered. Would it last as long as cold storage? (with running disk checks every six months)
...this is so offtopic, but I must know.
For a WD Red? Get that shingled magnetic shit out of my NAS.
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Looks at:
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AAA games costing 100€+ between base game and season pass.
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Online services on consoles constantly raising prices.
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Consoles that, over the time cost more instead of less.
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Wages frozen in time for years.
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Rest of unrelated to videogames stuff but that drain people's wages.
I WONDER WHY YOUNG PEOPLE SPEND LESS IN VIDEOGAMES...
wrote last edited by [email protected]That and broad, massive economic collapse in basically every other sector, at least in the US.
Can't play vidya gaem if hev no food starve.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/02/adp-jobs-report-june-2025.html
Oops.
Labor market (# of actual jobs) is now actually net contracting, shrinking.
Expected: +100k jobs
Reality: -33k jobs
Firings / Layoffs > Hiring.
Also the population grows, so uh, it actually has to be something like +200k to +250k to remain steady in terms of working age people vs jobs.
Sure, there are lots of 'job openings', but they're all fake ghost job bullshit that never actually hire anyone.
And they don't pay enough to bother doing them, and they have insane requirements that make no sense.
Great Depression 2.0 Gaming!
(The housing market is also collapsing if any readers haven't been paying attention.
My semi-educated guess is about a 55% drop by 24 months from now, compared to roughly '23-'24 highs.
Hope your boomer parents didn't buy in the last 5 years rofl!)
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Games are getting more expensive. Console prices are going nuts; the Playstation 2 launched at $299 USD.
Wages have been stagnant longer than I've been alive. More and more people are struggling to make ends meet let alone buy luxuries like video games, particularly the young because of our kleptogeriocracy.
Younger folks often use video games as a hangout spot, because young folks hanging out together in public is a felony now. So they play the same few games for tens of thousands of hours. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, I think the crowd that spend their adolescences in Garrysmod are in the attrition phase. You've already got a copy of these games, why buy another?
A lot of studios are being closed because business major's gonna business. Fuck brand recognition or loyalty, fuck development talent, fuck community building, fuck long-term strategy, we can realize a gain right now by sowing half the planet with salt, so that's what we're going to do. So what is there for people to buy?
That noise you heard last week was Xbox's death rattle. One out of the three mainstream home console platforms is an outright stupid idea to buy now.
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M-Disc
woah woah woah, Mr. Namedrop. What is this, now? 100GB RW Blu-rays? $57 for a pack of 6?
$57 for 600GB
$100 for a 4TB WD Red
the hard drive won't last as long
That implies it's powered. Would it last as long as cold storage? (with running disk checks every six months)
...this is so offtopic, but I must know.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Hard drives are affected by bit rot even when not in use. A disk check every six months would help, but is not a guarantee against data corruption or loss. M-DISCs are physically etched, and should last around a lifetime to a thousand years, depending on who you believe. The catch would be being able to read it in the distant future (in other words, if you're using M-DISC as a backup solution, you should also have a backup disc drive).
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Ugh first millennials aren't buying homes fast enough now it's this darn gen Z and not buying video games and 12 different streaming platforms. Such spoiled generations
Saw this stupid fucking headline on some magazine a coworker left behind today.
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Games are getting more expensive. Console prices are going nuts; the Playstation 2 launched at $299 USD.
Wages have been stagnant longer than I've been alive. More and more people are struggling to make ends meet let alone buy luxuries like video games, particularly the young because of our kleptogeriocracy.
Younger folks often use video games as a hangout spot, because young folks hanging out together in public is a felony now. So they play the same few games for tens of thousands of hours. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, I think the crowd that spend their adolescences in Garrysmod are in the attrition phase. You've already got a copy of these games, why buy another?
A lot of studios are being closed because business major's gonna business. Fuck brand recognition or loyalty, fuck development talent, fuck community building, fuck long-term strategy, we can realize a gain right now by sowing half the planet with salt, so that's what we're going to do. So what is there for people to buy?
That noise you heard last week was Xbox's death rattle. One out of the three mainstream home console platforms is an outright stupid idea to buy now.
the Playstation 2 launched at $299 USD.
Not disagreeing with you, but with inflation that's about $558 as of this comment.
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I’m pushing 40 so I’m not young but I’ve actually been buying more games lately thanks to being patient and not rushing out to buy AAA games along with switching from console to PC, gotta love Steam sales. I just bought two games I’ve been wanting to play for $30.
I'm a bit younger, though not a lot.
I all but stopped buying games because Epic and Amazon give so many away for free.
I've got like 500 free games that I haven't even installed once.
The only time I'd actually pay for a game is if it's a special one I want, and they've gotten few and far between.
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the Playstation 2 launched at $299 USD.
Not disagreeing with you, but with inflation that's about $558 as of this comment.
Inflation, yeah. The thing that has absolutely never been applied to wages?
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Inflation, yeah. The thing that has absolutely never been applied to wages?
Not disagreeing with you
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Not disagreeing with you
I hear about these cases of inflation, like the fact a pack of gum cost 15 trillion Zimbabwe dollars, or immediately after WWII the German...reichmarke or whatever they called it, was so worthless it took a wheelbarrow full to buy a loaf of bread.
Where do I get a wheelbarrow full of uselessly inflated USD? It's not actually inflation, is it?
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Games are getting more expensive. Console prices are going nuts; the Playstation 2 launched at $299 USD.
Wages have been stagnant longer than I've been alive. More and more people are struggling to make ends meet let alone buy luxuries like video games, particularly the young because of our kleptogeriocracy.
Younger folks often use video games as a hangout spot, because young folks hanging out together in public is a felony now. So they play the same few games for tens of thousands of hours. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, I think the crowd that spend their adolescences in Garrysmod are in the attrition phase. You've already got a copy of these games, why buy another?
A lot of studios are being closed because business major's gonna business. Fuck brand recognition or loyalty, fuck development talent, fuck community building, fuck long-term strategy, we can realize a gain right now by sowing half the planet with salt, so that's what we're going to do. So what is there for people to buy?
That noise you heard last week was Xbox's death rattle. One out of the three mainstream home console platforms is an outright stupid idea to buy now.
I bet you money right now that the next Xbox will be the best selling Xbox ever.
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Hard drives are affected by bit rot even when not in use. A disk check every six months would help, but is not a guarantee against data corruption or loss. M-DISCs are physically etched, and should last around a lifetime to a thousand years, depending on who you believe. The catch would be being able to read it in the distant future (in other words, if you're using M-DISC as a backup solution, you should also have a backup disc drive).
I'd need roughly 15-16 packs to do my entire archive atm, which is nearly $860.
...buuuut, I also see value in doing something like this over time. Say, I buy a pack once or twice a month, back up some data.
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M-Disc
woah woah woah, Mr. Namedrop. What is this, now? 100GB RW Blu-rays? $57 for a pack of 6?
$57 for 600GB
$100 for a 4TB WD Red
the hard drive won't last as long
That implies it's powered. Would it last as long as cold storage? (with running disk checks every six months)
...this is so offtopic, but I must know.
You would have to weigh disk rot vs hard disk mechanical component failure.
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I'd need roughly 15-16 packs to do my entire archive atm, which is nearly $860.
...buuuut, I also see value in doing something like this over time. Say, I buy a pack once or twice a month, back up some data.
Yeah. In my case, I'm mainly only doing this for irreplaceable data, such as documents and photos.
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Somewhere out there is an article by someone who walked around a games conference and came away from the experience horrified that so much of the content he was seeing was from small indie studios who weren’t in a position to hire wastes of oxygen like himself, and was furiously nail-biting about what this would do to the state of the industry.
Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio, and they do not deserve the award they just received for “best independent blah blah,” because “indie” has at this point simply become completely synonymous with “original and good.”
Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio
To save people from looking it up: The studio that made Dave the Diver is traded on the Tokyo stock exchange, has 7,000 employees, and brings in $2 billion USD per year.
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I bet you money right now that the next Xbox will be the best selling Xbox ever.
If I understand the situation, they're rebranding an Asus ROG handheld, which I imagine isn't going to outsell the Steam Deck or whatever the thing Lenovo is shipping with both Windows or SteamOS on, because they're late to the game and they'll fuck it up somehow, and I give 50/50 odds that there will be an announcement that they're cancelling the next home console launch.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
Single data point: my young, working, well off gaming part of my family is just out of energy. It's easier to watch a YouTube video instead of TV or gaming, before then falling asleep to wake up for work. Seems like much of their circle is similar.
As for myself, I'm going through a, uh, icky phase of life and am not really motivated to play unless it's coop.
...Maybe others are struggling similarly?
Also, the games we do look at tend to be from indie to mid-size studios, with BG3 and KCD2 being the only recent exceptions.
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Games are getting more expensive. Console prices are going nuts; the Playstation 2 launched at $299 USD.
Wages have been stagnant longer than I've been alive. More and more people are struggling to make ends meet let alone buy luxuries like video games, particularly the young because of our kleptogeriocracy.
Younger folks often use video games as a hangout spot, because young folks hanging out together in public is a felony now. So they play the same few games for tens of thousands of hours. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, I think the crowd that spend their adolescences in Garrysmod are in the attrition phase. You've already got a copy of these games, why buy another?
A lot of studios are being closed because business major's gonna business. Fuck brand recognition or loyalty, fuck development talent, fuck community building, fuck long-term strategy, we can realize a gain right now by sowing half the planet with salt, so that's what we're going to do. So what is there for people to buy?
That noise you heard last week was Xbox's death rattle. One out of the three mainstream home console platforms is an outright stupid idea to buy now.
wrote last edited by [email protected]+1 to literally everything.
Fuck brand recognition or loyalty, fuck development talent, fuck community building, fuck long-term strategy, we can realize a gain right now by sowing half the planet with salt, so that’s what we’re going to do. So what is there for people to buy?
I wish this would fit on a bumpersticker.
That noise you heard last week was Xbox’s death rattle. One out of the three mainstream home console platforms is an outright stupid idea to buy now.
And wasn't Sony the big risk of bowing out before? And then we got the Switch 2... It's remarkable that Microsoft somehow made Xbox the least likely to survive.
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Idk I only spent $25 this steam summer sale on 3 games, I think it was ok
