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.
Ashtear@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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.
chunes@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ve been living under a rock. What happened to baseball?
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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 foe at least a decade now.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
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.