Video games spending by young Americans is dropping sharply, report suggests : games

[–] AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@sh.itjust.works 261 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (15 children)

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...

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 100 points 1 week ago (11 children)

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?

[–] AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@sh.itjust.works 64 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

[–] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 6 days ago

And even today's potato PCs can run old AAA titles just fine.

[–] TachyonTele@piefed.social 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] grte@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 week ago

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.

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[–] ceenote@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Studies conducted at my desk and on my couch have also found a downward trend in video game quality.

[–] redsunrise@programming.dev 16 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

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!)

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I'm a younger millennial and bought just under 2 years ago. At like peak interest rates... Other than cost of houses what would a crash mean to the economy anyway?

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Uh, in a few words:

Great Depression 2.0, potentially worse.

The dollar has lost roughly 10% against all other currencies, because we are a debt laden nightmare that is either going to or beginning to default, going to not be the world currency / favored safe asset nation for bonds.

And we produce basically nothing tangible, we import a lot, so... everything gets more expensive.

Also we functionally just fired all our construction workers and farmers via ICE raids, so food goes up in price a lot, probably shortages, ie, famine... and we can't actually build any new houses or warehouses or office buildings or anything without much higher cost, from both imported materials and higher labor costs...

Oh right and the dollar tanking generally means oil, gas goes up in price, so anything involving logistics is now considerably more expensive.

Oh and basically everyone in the bottom 2/3rds by income distribution is in massivr amounts of debt, so, garnished wages, reduced consumer demand...

Yeah, I could go on, but I am quite serious when I say this could actually be worse than the Great Depression.

... I hope to god you didn't buy in roughly the lower 1/3rd of the country, almost all of those areas will be uninsurable within 10 years due to more frequent and more severe climate/weather events.

SoCals gonna burn down, Florida's gonna sink/melt into the ocean, get washed out by hurricanes.

Possibly the only possible bright sidd is that if you have significant stock investments of some kind, those might 'melt up' to roughly keep track with the devuation of the dollar, so you may have a chance at at least treading water there...

... but basically everything else is going to be a shitshow, business can't afford to pay the wages that would be necesssary for a worker to survive, amped up to 11... rents will probably start to trend down after a while though, as housing values nose dive.

Or maybe they'll just say you need to have ridiculous income level to qualify, but we'll give you 3 to 6 months of free rent.

They tend to do literally everything other than just lower prices for as long as they can.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I live in the UK, but our economy seems to generally follow the US except without any increase in productivity for over a decade and wages are trending towards minimum wage.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Ah. Well, as you can see, I am most familiar with the US economy...

but uh... broadly speaking, ya'll did the whole Brexit thing, and as best I am aware off the top of my head, ya'll are a bit more economically intertwined with the US than most of the rest of the EU...

So, as the US collapses, that'll disproportionately affect the UK as compared to other Eurozone economies, the financial / currency / bond market situation in the US will 'contagion' over to the UK faster, as will demand collapse for material goods and services.

But, I'd have to look over UK econ data in detail to be more specific than that.

Out of curiosity, can I ask what you approximatelty paid for the house in the UK?

One weird thing that could start happening (or intensifying) is that as the US dollar devalues... is that people/corporations with mostly USD will start trying to buy homes in places that they expect will have relative currency appreciation compared to the USD... basically, slow or long term currency arbitrage via homes as mainly financial assets.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

£230k which is on the cheaper end, got a small bungalow.

A fair few people here already dislike Londoners buying property and driving up prices because they earn more than the local population can. Tourist destinations get it particularly bad. I think a few parts of Wales have increased council tax (similar to property tax) for second homes that are left empty. An empty house doesn't contribute to the local economy.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

£230k is approximately $315k...

Yeah, in the US, that's significantly on the cheaper end as well, broadly speaking... i think what you call a bungalow is roughly what we'd call a starter home... but the problem in the US is... we don't really build those anymore, the construction companies can only turn a profit by making larger homes, that are also built to very shoddy standards.

That and the only areas with $315 or lower as a median home price are quite poor, with terrible economies and no reasonable transportation options... and the US largely murdered remote working after the corpos realized it would make their commericial office values collapse.

US median home sale price, over the whole US, is about $425k as of May, about £315k.

Maybe that will change after the whole housing market crashes, but that level of specificity is way too hard to meaningfully predict.

As to a second home tax... yeah you would think this we be an obvious thing to do, to combat gentrification, or at least make it have more fair broad social impacts... but here in the States, nearly nowhere actually does it, and there are a ton of legal loopholes and bs you can do to get around it.

Instead, a lot of places actually encourage second homes with tax incentives and write offs for getting one... because... entrepreneurship, or something.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 points 5 days ago

Oh my house was way below the median, in my region of the country the median house price was £385k when I bought. If anything bungalows are often seen as a retirement option as well because no stairs to climb. At the same price range we could have got a terrace house, but they were in worse areas of town and the gardens much smaller. This is small (60m²) but its enough, after that I would like to have some outside space too. Which is also fairly small but its still something, the entire property is about 150m².

We need more places to apply similar taxes to discourage houses being left empty. It won't fix the problem but its a step in the right direction. Rentals being left empty for long periods of time is also a problem, for both residential and commercial property.

Still working remote, not sure how long I will be able to keep that but I have had to refuse orders to start commuting more than once. Compromise agreement is offered and everyone forgets about it while we continue not going into the office more than a handful of times a year. They moved the office over 50 miles away which I am using as my (quite reasonable!) justification to not go in on a regular basis. If it remained local I could cycle in more often quite happily. Yeah in my area there are not the best job opportunities, but there is at least work to be done if you want to just take any job and its not like the pay makes much difference. In the UK we have comparably good minimum wage. I am on £26k (~£13.33/h) and minimum wage gets you £12.21/hour. So even if I just switched to literally any job I wouldn't be taking much of a pay cut and its actually cheaper than taking the train each day would be as rail is really expensive here.

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[–] _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 84 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I'm sure it has nothing to do with shitty half baked $70 games

[–] AmazingAwesomator@lemmy.world 36 points 1 week ago (1 children)

and the microtransactions inside them. and the underwhelming day 1 dlc.

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[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

overpriced games
fully-priced games with microtransactions and day 1 DLCs.
overpriced hardware
games released broken, fixed later
Invasive DRM
Always-online requirements
annoying ads/microtransactions
invasive telemetry
third party launchers
third party accounts
Publishers intentionally misleading reviewers
False/misleading marketing from GPU OEMs

What else am I missing?

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[–] ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 75 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Funny how that happens when people don't have any money.

[–] callouscomic@lemmy.zip 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

And when so much of gaming is shit.

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[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 59 points 1 week ago (23 children)

Games are getting more expensive. Console prices are going nuts; the Playstation 2 launched at $299 USD.

Wages have been stagnant longer than I've been alive. More and more people are struggling to make ends meet let alone buy luxuries like video games, particularly the young because of our kleptogeriocracy.

Younger folks often use video games as a hangout spot, because young folks hanging out together in public is a felony now. So they play the same few games for tens of thousands of hours. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, I think the crowd that spend their adolescences in Garrysmod are in the attrition phase. You've already got a copy of these games, why buy another?

A lot of studios are being closed because business major's gonna business. Fuck brand recognition or loyalty, fuck development talent, fuck community building, fuck long-term strategy, we can realize a gain right now by sowing half the planet with salt, so that's what we're going to do. So what is there for people to buy?

That noise you heard last week was Xbox's death rattle. One out of the three mainstream home console platforms is an outright stupid idea to buy now.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

+1 to literally everything.

Fuck brand recognition or loyalty, fuck development talent, fuck community building, fuck long-term strategy, we can realize a gain right now by sowing half the planet with salt, so that’s what we’re going to do. So what is there for people to buy?

I wish this would fit on a bumpersticker.

That noise you heard last week was Xbox’s death rattle. One out of the three mainstream home console platforms is an outright stupid idea to buy now.

And wasn't Sony the big risk of bowing out before? And then we got the Switch 2... It's remarkable that Microsoft somehow made Xbox the least likely to survive.

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[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 52 points 1 week ago (1 children)

~~Video games~~ spending by young Americans is dropping

FTFY

[–] seejur@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago

Who would have thought that if you squeeze out every single penny out of 99% of Americans to pocket them, 99% of Americans would have no penny left to spend?

Some American billionaire probably

[–] orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts 50 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I love the constant onslaught of articles that are like “people aren’t spending money anymore!!!” Open your damn eyes. We all got smart and refuse to pay $80 (which is now the new forced norm for “AAA” garbage) and are replaying oldies and indies. Hell, I revamped my 3DS and have dumped a ton of games onto it. I can even play some of them online with people again via Pretendo.

Like all of the reasons are so obvious why people aren’t dumping money into this industry anymore. Capitalists fucked it all up and put profit over fun. We’re not all dipshits that fall for the constant micro transactions and grifts.

I legit don’t give a single shit about any of the new “AAA” games coming out. Give me a call when they’re in the bargain bin years from now.

[–] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 week ago

Exactly this. The new game cycle these days is:

Game is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff.
Release date is announced.
Game is delayed.
Reviewers/early access people get it, turns out it has none of the cool stuff form the announcement video.
Game is delayed again.
Game finally comes out, with 3 different tiers that are like $80, $100 and $120 CAD depending on if you want the version of the game that's 30%, 40% or 50% complete.
Game doesn't work.
After about two years and 10 DLC packs you have about 80% of the functional game, the other 20% being stuff they were supposed to add but just never bothered, what are you gonna do about it? By this point you no longer care about the game anyway.
Sequel is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff, devs promise they've fixed all the broken stuff this time for real.
Company gets bought by EA or Epic, all devs are replaced.
Game is delayed.

Like genuinely who wants to bother with that nonsense anymore TBH.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 40 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Somewhere out there is an article by someone who walked around a games conference and came away from the experience horrified that so much of the content he was seeing was from small indie studios who weren’t in a position to hire wastes of oxygen like himself, and was furiously nail-biting about what this would do to the state of the industry.

Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio, and they do not deserve the award they just received for “best independent blah blah,” because “indie” has at this point simply become completely synonymous with “original and good.”

[–] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 week ago

Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio

To save people from looking it up: The studio that made Dave the Diver is traded on the Tokyo stock exchange, has 7,000 employees, and brings in $2 billion USD per year.

[–] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

We can't justify the price. The end. That's it.

I was super interested in the Dune game, then they decided to not participate in the stream sale. Okay. Too bad. Life goes on. Get fucked, greedy devs.

[–] Don_alForno@feddit.org 44 points 1 week ago

greedy devs

Publishers, mostly.

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[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 37 points 1 week ago (4 children)

It's a two part answer.

One, gamers have less money to spend, along with everyone else.

Two, expensive AAA title games these days tend to be shit, from a graphics, code, community, and content standpoint. If you want good games, cheaper is usually better.

Last AAA title game I bought was Borderlands 3, and I don't see myself buying anymore in the next two years or so.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 days ago

I got shadow of mordor on a huge discount and it still barely felt worth it.

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[–] Onyxonblack@lemmy.zip 36 points 1 week ago (13 children)

I'm just done with Capitalism in general. I got 1000 games, 200 of which are GOG offline installers. Those are burned onto M-Disc storage for the apocalypse. Cancelled all TV streaming, no buying games or books even. Nothing but food and bills now as I wait for it all to collapse.

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[–] poke@sh.itjust.works 32 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The hobby is getting more expensive while income left over after cost of living is going down. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

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[–] Taco2112@lemmy.world 30 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I’m pushing 40 so I’m not young but I’ve actually been buying more games lately thanks to being patient and not rushing out to buy AAA games along with switching from console to PC, gotta love Steam sales. I just bought two games I’ve been wanting to play for $30.

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[–] Flickerby@lemmy.zip 30 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When new games are approaching $100 and you know you can wait a month or two for it to drop $40 it's an easy decision

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 21 points 1 week ago (3 children)

60-80 for the base half-finished game plus 30+ for DLC, console extras

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[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Older games are better plus gamers can play all our existing games.

[–] DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

This is why publisher's are trying to derail "Stop Killing Games."

When they are done with a a game the don't WANT you to continue to play and enjoy it....

...they want you to forget about it and buy the next product they have and financially engage with the microtransaction ecosystem

[–] Zirconium@lemmy.world 27 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Ugh first millennials aren't buying homes fast enough now it's this darn gen Z and not buying video games and 12 different streaming platforms. Such spoiled generations

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[–] W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Every game or movie that comes out now is a reboot/remake. Why would I buy that? I already bought that.

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[–] Rakonat@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Charging 70 dollars USD for barely 40 USD of content and everyone knows. The only people I know intent on buying all the latest stuff are people into steamer culture, aka trying to be a streamer or interact with them and follow their trends.

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[–] zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 18 points 1 week ago

The day of the backlog has come! Portable PC enjoyers rejoice!

[–] blockheadjt@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Make a timeline comparing the rising cost of games, rising unemployment, addition of tariffs on exports from Japan and this. Notice a pattern?

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[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

I don’t need the 7th iteration of the same game dressed up with new graphics for the price they're charging.

[–] mrodri89@lemmy.zip 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Depression has me not so interested in playing games anymore. Reading instead. Gaming is losing its magic for me. I’m 36.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 week ago

Idk I only spent $25 this steam summer sale on 3 games, I think it was ok