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Gen Z Is Cutting Back On Video Game Purchases
(www.vice.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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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?
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 for 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.
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.
Yeah, I was never bored, but it is a deterrent to keep up with the sport when each game goes 3 hours and there are over 150 of them in a season. Cutting off all that extra time is only a good thing.
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).
And they're all doing the same nonsense with making it annoying to watch. I'm not asserting that I'm definitely right or anything. I haven't done anything resembling actual analysis of the trend. Intuitively though, given my own experiences with the prospect of following a sport I enjoy or not, I wouldn't be surprised if it was just the leagues offering poor value to a demographic that hasn't been locked in to the sport yet.
Sure, and I'm not disagreeing that being able to engage with professional sports at all is a big factor. I think there's more factors at play here than just that, for anecdotal reasons if nothing else, but I think you're dead right about one of the biggest ones.
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.
Bingo. And now you understand why most outlets haven't really been saying this and it is mostly the slop farms like modern day waypoint (although,Ana Valens is one of the scabs who walked after vice removed all mention of the christofacists attacking video games storefronts).
Spending is indeed down all over. But when you are actively ignoring a lot of data (because most analyst groups don't get access to roblox corp's revenue charts), those categories "drop" a lot harder.
You nailed it with the age thing.