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

and indie games are cheaper and better

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

The seven seas are way more friendly

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

Edit: /s

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.

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

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.

Could it be that the economy fucking sucks?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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...