Video games spending by young Americans is dropping sharply, report suggests
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- overpriced games
- fully-priced games with microtransactions and day 1 DLCs.
- overpriced hardware
- games released broken, fixed later
- Invasive DRM
- Always-online requirements
- annoying ads/microtransactions
- invasive telemetry
- third party launchers
- third party accounts
- Publishers intentionally misleading reviewers
- False/misleading marketing from GPU OEMs
What else am I missing?
- Games locked behind exclusivity deals begging/forcing to install multiple launchers to play different games
- Major game-dev doesnt innovate and have forgot how to be imaginative.
- Games as services is priority cause it brings money to corpos
Thankfully, indie-dev is epic right this moment! Lot's of lesser known but very fun games coming out.
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But you can get hundreds of hours from a f2p game, so that's the competition $70 games have. Then there's older triple a titles that are cheaper, and there's so many that it's not possible to have played all of them. Then epic giveaways, game bundles, indies, etc.
And price increases push more consumers away from impulse purchases. And that can lead to them becoming patient gamers once they see not buying at release isn't a big deal.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Sure... But the existence of f2p games doesn't really affect how much I personally value an hour's worth of video game entertainment.
It should also be noted that companies don't make f2p games out of the kindness of their hearts, they are making money somehow, and if it's not through microtransactions, then you are the product.
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Can’t wait till the indie wave wakes up the realization that there is a goldmine of 90s games that were incredible. Star control 2 for one could probably be mistaken for a new indie hit nowadays.
A new Star Control is coming up, made by the OG developers. I am very much looking forward to it.
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Agreed. Many good games dropped this year. Expedition 33, death stranding 2, oblivion remastered.
Dark Souls 4 DLC was p great.
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I guess it's the over 25s buying all those Switch 2s then?
youtubers and twitch streamers who spent the past 6 months complaining about how games shouldn't be that expensive
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A new Star Control is coming up, made by the OG developers. I am very much looking forward to it.
Nice! Wish listing now!
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Sure... But the existence of f2p games doesn't really affect how much I personally value an hour's worth of video game entertainment.
It should also be noted that companies don't make f2p games out of the kindness of their hearts, they are making money somehow, and if it's not through microtransactions, then you are the product.
Paid games hasn't kept them from not having aggressive microtransactions themselves and sometimes worse. And there's so many sources of games now beyond big publishers. The gaming landscape just isn't the same as in the past that it can get away with setting whatever price they want and expect to turn a profit. The old hour of value stance isn't as relevant, and is more likely to lead to bombs even amongst triple A publishers with their vast marketing budgets with that attitude. There's way more options now that people don't have to settle.
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Games are 70 and 80 dollars now. Young people can't afford them. I can't either, but I would refuse to pay that price regardless, anyway.
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It's a two part answer.
One, gamers have less money to spend, along with everyone else.
Two, expensive AAA title games these days tend to be shit, from a graphics, code, community, and content standpoint. If you want good games, cheaper is usually better.
Last AAA title game I bought was Borderlands 3, and I don't see myself buying anymore in the next two years or so.
And now BL3 is literally $3 on steam. I paid fucking $60 or $70 for it. Whatever it was.
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Nitpick: It's probably not the devs so much as the capitalist owners and management collaborators. I'd guess most of the people making the games would be happy to have someone play their game at all. It's not like they typically get a cut of the profits (again: capitalism)
wrote last edited by [email protected]It's the publishers. They're in control of any discounts or sales. Steam sale or otherwise.
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That's because most of them are playing F2P video games on their mobile devices.
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youtubers and twitch streamers who spent the past 6 months complaining about how games shouldn't be that expensive
wrote last edited by [email protected]Even then I knew they were all still going to buy them.
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Back in the early 90s I would walk into a store, buy a game that came in a box with a manual, take it home and it was mine.
I bought the 1st Civilization like this. I still have it. No Internet needed.
That's the way it should be. All the online, dlc, mini boxes, group play, create online accounts.....fuck all that shit.
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It's good, there's been a few major updates adding new zones, better NPCs, animals, more gear/weapons, and so on..
wrote last edited by [email protected]At least it is still being updated and just happy to hear it hasn't gone dark like most other Early Access titles.
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At least it is still being updated and just happy to hear it hasn't gone dark like most other Early Access titles.
Yeah they're making steady progress on major updates, and releasing patches for bugs and tweaks in between.
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Or even better, play an old game that you still haven't played. I can get titanfall 2 for the price of a coffee and play it for the first time if I'm craving for a good AAA fps.
And even today's potato PCs can run old AAA titles just fine.
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It's a two part answer.
One, gamers have less money to spend, along with everyone else.
Two, expensive AAA title games these days tend to be shit, from a graphics, code, community, and content standpoint. If you want good games, cheaper is usually better.
Last AAA title game I bought was Borderlands 3, and I don't see myself buying anymore in the next two years or so.
I got shadow of mordor on a huge discount and it still barely felt worth it.
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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!)
I'm a younger millennial and bought just under 2 years ago. At like peak interest rates... Other than cost of houses what would a crash mean to the economy anyway?
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I'm a younger millennial and bought just under 2 years ago. At like peak interest rates... Other than cost of houses what would a crash mean to the economy anyway?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Uh, in a few words:
Great Depression 2.0, potentially worse.
The dollar has lost roughly 10% against all other currencies, because we are a debt laden nightmare that is either going to or beginning to default, going to not be the world currency / favored safe asset nation for bonds.
And we produce basically nothing tangible, we import a lot, so... everything gets more expensive.
Also we functionally just fired all our construction workers and farmers via ICE raids, so food goes up in price a lot, probably shortages, ie, famine... and we can't actually build any new houses or warehouses or office buildings or anything without much higher cost, from both imported materials and higher labor costs...
Oh right and the dollar tanking generally means oil, gas goes up in price, so anything involving logistics is now considerably more expensive.
Oh and basically everyone in the bottom 2/3rds by income distribution is in massivr amounts of debt, so, garnished wages, reduced consumer demand...
Yeah, I could go on, but I am quite serious when I say this could actually be worse than the Great Depression.
... I hope to god you didn't buy in roughly the lower 1/3rd of the country, almost all of those areas will be uninsurable within 10 years due to more frequent and more severe climate/weather events.
SoCals gonna burn down, Florida's gonna sink/melt into the ocean, get washed out by hurricanes.
Possibly the only possible bright sidd is that if you have significant stock investments of some kind, those might 'melt up' to roughly keep track with the devuation of the dollar, so you may have a chance at at least treading water there...
... but basically everything else is going to be a shitshow, business can't afford to pay the wages that would be necesssary for a worker to survive, amped up to 11... rents will probably start to trend down after a while though, as housing values nose dive.
Or maybe they'll just say you need to have ridiculous income level to qualify, but we'll give you 3 to 6 months of free rent.
They tend to do literally everything other than just lower prices for as long as they can.
