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 16 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.
ushmel@piefed.world 11 hours ago
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.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
It’s possible there are multiple influences at play here. I’m certainly not disagreeing with you, 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 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. 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 (gaming, drone racing, CTFs, competitive nerf battles, etc.) which gives you an appreciation for the game that is missing from most professional sports. 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 and a couple piles of sweatshirts) and more formal infrastructure for it is incredibly common to find. 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 barrier to entry by quite a bit (nets, mainly). 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?