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Not sure why anyone would buy games at this point.
There are so many games available for free, and any new ones kinda suck donkey balls. Couple that with a shitty economy, grocery prices are through the roof, and it's no surprise people aren't wasting money on video games as much.
Because the new ones are great. There has been no shortage of bangers for the last few years.
If you say so.
…what physical games and hardware?
That doesn’t feel too surprising. There’s nothing really new to buy in terms of hardware; likely everyone who wanted a specific console now has one. And others like myself are waiting: I want a Switch 2 OLED, but that’s not available yet.
And there’s also the fact that many game releases now suck, with no real must-have titles for console to boost sales right now. And new physical titles are expensive.
It’s just a dip caused by a combination of factors. If GTA VI releases next november, the chart is going to look like a rocket taking off.
And there’s also the fact that many game releases now suck
I don't think I've ever had more great new game releases, personally.
Good, maybe now prices for them will finally come back down to reality. $500 for a switch is bonkers and $800 for an Xbox of any variety is outright criminal.
Prices won’t fall, not until the AI bubble bursts and the related industries shift focus back to consumer-level goods.
At best, you could hope prices remain steady for a few years and real-world incomes slowly rise to match this new normal.
Prices are not going to come down. If they could get a Switch 2 in your home for $300, they would. The component parts are too expensive.
X (doubt)
They're too greedy to let things go at cost now, they know parents and fans will get it anyway. Look at parking alone for disney world, like $175.
Greed has ruined companies. Nintendo won't sell bubble bobble for NES, I have to find a used cartridge or do without. They don't sell nor support it. So I use a rom and they cry about that. They don't get it both ways, fuck Nintendo. I'll never stop seeding/sharing my massive rom collection, switch games included.
The funny thing about Disney, and believe me, I don't want to defend them here, is that they've found ways to admit and fit far more people into the park as demand rose for a thing that inherently has fixed supply. More or less the same thing is happening with GPUs and memory right now as AI demand is sucking up so much supply and they can't be produced any faster. The supply can't increase, so the prices go up. They have to. Nintendo and Sony both know they stand to make more money after the fact if they sell you a cheaper console, but they can't lose $200 per unit either, or there's very little chance they make a profit on it ever.
Switch 2 has a much healthier margin than Switch. Nintendo is actually making money on the hardware this time. They don’t have the lineup or the services to justify the hardware being a loss leader and won’t until probably 2027.
Here’s to hoping the Steam Machine is $799 or less.
I don't think its necessarily the prices that are the issue but what you're getting for it. Games have historically not kept up with inflation and still cost less than what we were paying for SNES carts in the 90s, but now they're the 15th sequel of some franchise and are only half finished so there isn't much draw for customers.
For physical software, it's super hard to buy it if stores aren't stocking it.
The Xbox section doesn't really exist at Target, Walmart, or Costco anymore, and it's on the way out at Best Buy. Naturally that's going to have an impact on sales.
Further, Microsoft doesn't seem interested in physical sales anymore. I probably would have bought Avowed if it existed in meat-space, it doesn't. I had a really hard time sourcing Indiana Jones and Outer Worlds 2.
On the hardware side, I already have this generations worth of hardware (PS5, XSX, Steam Deck), and I'm not interested in all the baggage on the Switch 2.
Plus, hardware prices are up.
So the surprise would be if sales hadn't gone down.
Go Trump! God I love winning.🙃
and of course, this will be misconstrued. The executives will shout "look! people don't want physical ownership!" and the push to digital rentals will continue... and result in even higher prices when they pull a Netflix.
If it goes all digital next generation I won't be bothering. I didn't leave gaming, gaming is leaving me.
Cool, cool, plenty of backlog to get through...
Execs genuinely couldn‘t care less about what people want. They are the architects of this trend away from physical media.
I’m making the prediction that any hardware that isn‘t essentially just a screen that connects to the internet will become more and more expensive to the point no one can afford them. Major brands that we all know and use today will withdraw from manufacturing end consumer products.
I‘m guessing 10 years from now virtually everyone will be forced into cloud service subscriptions for gaming because the hardware to run these games won‘t be sold to us anymore. For a while Chinese companies might try fill the void the likes of Nvidia and AMD left but that will be short lived too.
You will go retro and learn to take care of your soon old timer hardware that will become ever more pricey to fix as spare parts get more rare and ridiculously expensive expensive or you will own nothing and be happy with that.
Yes this is all speculative but it‘s a vision of the future that becomes more and more obvious to me by the day.
Alternatively, the bubble collapses and the video game industry needs to be rebuilt
Xbox is just a subscription rental business at this point, Microsoft doesn’t seem interested in gaming outside of that.
The problem is if nobody sells affordable hardware or hardware at all anymore, the only path they can go is cloud gaming. That means from here on onward ownership is dead.
Physical versions only have value of they are complete and relatively bug free, and originally purposed to avoid big downloads.
Nowadays day 1 patching may be the same size as the install or larger negating half the point. The other half is lost because almost everything is a subscription, multi-player, or delivered with too many bugs as a beta test.
Collecting physical copies is a thing, but is niche.
I’m kind of curious how things like this get tallied. Basically it’s a physical box of the game with a download code but no cartridge.
I just want to lick a couple more Switch cartridges fresh out the box. Is that too much to ask?
On a related note I had a hankering for playing the Etrian Oddysey games and went to look for it at the Nintendo Switch store.
Eighty fucking dollars for the trilogy remaster. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum I guess.
Worst physical hardware and software sales since 1995 so far. Switch 2 won't be its first holiday next year and potential price hikes from storage and ram next year
Worth pointing out that Circana does not fully track Steam (only some, albeit large publishers). They don't track GOG or Epic at all (they are of course a lot smaller than Steam).
Why would any of that affect physical software? Does steam and gog sell cartridges or discs that I'm unaware of?
I got confused by the following:
While Circana reports that content spending was up 1% year-over-year to $4.8 billion, that's with subscription spending rising 16% and 2% growth in mobile.
This is about physical sales, not digital.
what happened in 1995?
The market was just way smaller back then. Video games weren't a mainstream hobby yet.
PlayStation 1 had only just come to America a month or two prior, and the n64 wouldn't exist for another year. Basically, it was just arcade games that were popular at that point, some snes games, and some ps1 games in Japan.
Imagine "gaming" being just donkey kong, street fighter, mario, and contra, and a ps1 cost $300 usd.
"Gaming" then was about as popular as virtual reality now.