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Video games spending by young Americans is dropping sharply, report suggests
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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Looks at:
AAA games costing 100€+ between base game and season pass.
Online services on consoles constantly raising prices.
Consoles that, over the time cost more instead of less.
Wages frozen in time for years.
Rest of unrelated to videogames stuff but that drain people's wages.
I WONDER WHY YOUNG PEOPLE SPEND LESS IN VIDEOGAMES...
Also competition, and I'm not actually talking about indie games, although that's helping. Competition with older games. Why in the world would someone pay $80 for a mediocre new game when they could replay a classic hit that they haven't played in few years? When was the last time you played the witcher 3, or the mass effect trilogy? Would you rather replay one of those, or pay $80 for the new assassin's creed?
I'm current stuck in a long term cycle of mainly Project Zomboid, Factorio, Valheim, Oxygen Not Included, The Lone Dark and Rimworld, were when I'm fed up of playing the last of them, it's been long enough since I played the first one that it's once interesting to play it.
Even when I manage to be fed up with playing all of them at any one point, I still have other progression games with complex emergent gameplay (often but not always games which have algorithmically generated game areas) like Kenshi. 7 Days to Die or OpenTTD that pull me in and if that fails, I can always pick up one of the old open world roleplay jewels such as Skyrim and play that.
I've barelly tried anything else in the last couple of years and of those only Oxygen Not Include was the only one with any lasting power and I picked that one years ago.
It's not even because I can't afford it (though out of principl I refuse to pay more than €20 for a game) - whenever I try an AAA game nowadays (always games that came out years ago) it's almost invariably an inferior experience that either feels too constrained or doesn't have enough gameplay variety and complexity to be fun for long.
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.
Oh shiiiit, do that and come back and talk to us when you get to the time travel level.
Are we just in the phase of the medium where technology isn't the defining quality. It would be slightly weird to try to stay at the forefront of, say, novels without any regard for reading classics. Why shouldn't games be the same?
The single player is pretty good in that. It's definitely worth trying out.
Being in the giant mech doesn't feel any different than not being in it though. That's my only complaint.
I remember at the time titanfall came out, the mechs moving like a human was a selling point. I do agree though it is odd to experience when its not a novelty.
I replay TLOU, TLOU 2 and Days Gone yearly.
I used to play new big AAA games, but none of them seem interesting these days.
I'd rather replay old games that are top tier than waste time on mediocre new crap.
There's also lots of (frequently not even that) old games that I never got around to/never heard about that I can now get on sale for 5$ or whatever, so it's not always a matter of replaying.
I am playing a new character in Elder Scrolls 3 - Morrowind right now. The modding community for that game is so good, with OpenMW (a open source engine rebuild) and the tool "umo" it was so easy to install a curated mod list that not only upscaled the graphics but also extended the game with not only a huge part of the Morrowind mainland but also parts of cyrodiil and Skyrim. So much new content and places to explore now!
You wouldnt happen to be on linux would you?
Yes, I am using Arch btw 😜🤣 Sorry but I couldn't resist the opportunity 😁
Nice! I am too, I'll have to check out the modpack loader thingy that sounds fantastic!
It is here: https://modding-openmw.gitlab.io/umo/
Just (re) started Dead Space after not playing it for 10-15 years. Still good, still enjoy, why buy when I can just replay games I've forgotten the story to?
Same for Control a few months ago... And I'm sure others.
Especially when most games that've come out this year run like shit, and a new graphics card is nearly a rent payment
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!)
BLS jobs report was a beat, +140k jobs and unemployment down a shade. I agree with you on the themes but it doesn't help to cherry pick data.
The BLS jobs estimate report is utterly garbage data.
Go look back over the last year or two.
Look at how many times, and how many jobs they revised down from the report 1 or 2 months prior.
All the idiots that watch Jim Cramer for financial advice are the same idiots that never bother to follow up on the BLS revisions.
Also, the BLS jobs estimate is an estimate that goes through a whole bunch of layers of dependency on other statistics like estimated populations growth.
Meanwhile the ADP is much more directly based on actual payrolls, from actual money going out to actual employees.
You should maybe learn how to actually compare the methodologies behind various sources of data before you accuse someone of cherry picking.
...
Also the unemployment rates that are widely reported on don't count people who've been unemployed so long that they fall out of the labor force.
In our modern economy, if you fall off the treadmill, you stay unemployed for that long, you'll likely never get hired in that field again, or at least not without having to start out at an entry level or junior position, because of how absurd companies are with job requirements, how every job opening has 1000 applicants in 72 hrs, how something like 2/3rds of those job openings are fake and will never hire anyone.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylrobinson/2025/04/02/why-no-one-is-hiring-you-and-its-not-your-resume/
What are you talking about? They're both estimates extrapolated from samples. I think most statisticians would prefer stratified sampling over one company's payrolls processing, but whatever. Maybe chuds would argue that ADP is so much more efficient/accurate because it's outside of the "swamp" of govt, it's certainly an independent data point. I mean I agree with you in that BLS is not reliable either. Real time economics is hard.
If you honestly preferred ADP all along and will continue to espouse it's superiority when it next contradicts your view rather than confirming it (as it will because data are noisy) then more power to you.
Well now you've met a statistician, a person with an Econ degree, specialization in Econometrics who is telling you the BLS numbers have been garbage for 2 years, based off of how many revisions they have to keep doing, and the magnitude of those adjustments.
I've been a professional data analyst at multiple large companies for years, I'm not going to explain this further unless you want to pay me for the full 40 page methodology breakdown.
Real time economics is not hard for me, it was my career until I retired.
Damn near every single measurable metric in the US economy beyond what's in the most easy to consume, most non specialist oriented media is screaming that everything is going tits up.
Hey when was the last time the Fed had to significantly jump into the Repo market to bail it out?
Oh, right, it was this past week.
I'm not going to bother to list out every single indicator/methodology I consider because 1) I'd break the lemmy comment post character limit (its 10k, btw) and 2) I'm used to being paid for such detail.
Ah an economist, say no more fam.
Studies conducted at my desk and on my couch have also found a downward trend in video game quality.
I'm a pretty conservative game purchaser. I've never paid over $40 for a game (including games on sale) because there are so, so many amazing indie games on Steam that charge so little for many hours of fun.
When I see a AAA game come out, I know it's going to be profit-driven, uninspired, and rushed because it exists solely for the purpose of making money for a large corp. For that reason (among others), I avoid them altogether because I know my dollar goes way further going toward an independent developer who makes games for passion (and only sometimes for money). The passion always shines through in their work, unlike passionless AAA games.
Don't forget all the online requirements with accounts even if you want to play single player, and constant server issues on launch that seem to happen with every game now because none of them allow community servers anymore.
The death of community servers is why I stopped playing multiplayer.
The gaming landscape was just so much better back when communities were able to self-host and moderate before matchmaking and corporate automated moderation became the norm.
I still play multiplayer, but on games that still support community servers like Minecraft, Enshrouded, Arma 3, Space Engineers..
How has Enshrouded been doing? I haven't been able to get on my PC in almost a year and only got to play it on initial release.
It's good, there's been a few major updates adding new zones, better NPCs, animals, more gear/weapons, and so on..
Yup, no way to figured this one out.
Also, the games market was brought up a lot by the global pandemic and had to come down eventually.
Free games like fortnite
Also, with the speed that games have been coming out the last 20 years, there’s always something on sale to play