Well, gee, I wonder why. Not like their money isn’t going more for necessities after all
Everyone is.
I don’t buy new releases anymore.
Why?
Cause the prices are getting stupid. Cause its all digital downloads with no physical product. Cause my “ownership” can be revoked at any time by the platforms whims or the platforms shutdown.
What happened to digital downloads being cheaper, anyway? Thats the promise we were sold 10+ years ago. That by sacrificing physical products, Publishers/Devs wouldnt have to pay for printing, manufacturing, shipping, storage, etc, so they’d be able to sell AAA new releases for 30 dollars, and Pub/Dev would still make more money.
And now we’re supposed to be paying 60, 70, 80 dollars or more, for these digital download games… that we don’t even own? And because they have no product on the shelves, prices never come down either. Sure, you might find a sale like on steam or something… but those sales pale in comparison to what they were 5, 10 years ago
Fuck that. Amazing how the only promise fulfilled on moving to digital download was that pubs/devs would get more money… and they get that by skyrocketing the costs, not because of the sacrifices we made to give up boxes, disks, manuals, and ownership
My main reason for not buying games is that epic and amazon give them away for free.
I’ve got a backlog of around 500 games I haven’t touched or paid for, so there’s plenty to do without paying for anything.
subscribing to humble monthly is also a good way to amass games on the cheap. not as cheap as free, of course, but still better than most sales.
Oh gee! I wonder why is this happening?!
I guess we’ll never know!
Anyway, let’s release another copy-paste game at 90€/$ with 50€/$ in dlcs and another collector edition with some plastic toy for 300!
Don’t forget to delete last year’s version from all your customers’ hard drives!
Look: we just removed the game from your account so you can purchase the new one without regrets!
A collectors edition that doesn’t include the game either.
It’s for your own good. This way you can purchase the game separately and we keep the collector edition at a reasonable price tag.
But it does have a moldy nylon bag!
I knew there was a reason I kept this photo around.
And all the advertising will show the game next to a canvas bag.
Someone downvoted because they don’t want to remember Bethesda’s shenanigans?
Ah nah that’s just because I make it my mission to piss off tankies. You’ll see downvotes on all kinds of comments like “Human Rights should be upheld”, “Cake is always welcome”, or “Google shouldn’t own an advertisement monopoly” not because they oppose the message but because they regularly go through my comment history. (And tankies also do kind of oppose those messages sometimes).
90€ + 50€ • DLC? Isn’t that too little for the poor record-profit industry titans with budgets in the billions and nonsensical brand loyalty all over the world?
We need to keep the games affordable so they can spend some money in the microtransaction hell that is our store and that is basically mandatory if you want to keep up the pace with the other players in the pvp mode of the game (the only one available, because we removed local modes since we believe that playing with friends
doesn’t make you want to spend on lootboxesis not as fun as playing with randosoriginally i was going to get the first swsh in the generation plus a switch at the time, no thank you, based on how the game came out and what the company, gamefreak said will happen to the future games. 300-400$ switch, +60+15 dlc+ nintendo related services, and storage.(im underestimating some of the costs)
Collectors editions don’t even include physical items anymore. At least you got something cool to keep. Now it’s some worthless download you get once and never again.
I still have those cheap night vision goggles from one of the Call of Duty editions. They’re subpar quality but still pretty cool.
This criticism is genuinely like 10-13 years out of date, gramps.
And yet here we are, with games more expensive than 10 years ago and people spending less than 10 years ago. Seems strange, right?
At least 10 years ago there were some interesting AAA games, even with those problems. Now they they charge that shit for remasters and rehashes.
Hasn’t been a non indie game I was excited about in years.
Yes, but today’s industry problems are way different than collector’s editions with that, of anything that feels quaint enough to peak my curiousity
and indie games are cheaper and better
Yeah, why would anyone buy another copy of Mario Kart with minor changes for €80 when there’s much better indie games for a quarter or less of that price?
From my perspective as a millennial, people are running out of time and energy too.
Like, I know a couple, both working, no kids, avid and techy gamers who know to play stuff like KCDII, yet they mostly plop down for YouTube at the end of the day. A VG or longer form TV is too draining, and too long.
Video games have been my biggest hobbies for basically my entire life, but I barely play them anymore for basically this reason.
For me, I didn’t have the mental energy. At a previous job, I was so mentally strained working 8 hours nonstop on highly mentally taxing tasks that even if I wanted to play a game, it felt like a chore rather than something I can enjoy or wind down to. Even if I had the time, since I do other stuff outside of work.
The strange thing is, when I work I have the money but not the time nor energy to justify buying games to sink time into. When I don’t work I have the time and energy but not the money to justify paying $80-$100 on a game I probably won’t play as much as I think otherwise.
I’ve in recent years looking more into reviews and such to weigh in whether or not I want to buy the game in the first place. Compare that to years prior when I could look at a trailer or short snippet and get a good idea of what the game has to offer. Now I’m more weary of grindy game mechanics and predatory micro transactions.
Yeah. People have no money. Ask one of the billionaires to prop up this failing industry.
Edit: /s
Less money to buy games, cost of games go up, quality still crap, riddled with micro transactions. Why buy a game when it comes out when you can wait to buy it on a sale while you play your backlog and by the time you buy the game it will be the best version because they had time to fix it up, almost never to the degree it should be but still the best it’s going to get
What stands out most from the article is that the 18-24 demographic has a 25% drop off compared to other groups with a 5% drop off.
Not a great sign for the future if cut backs isn’t simply due to deciding to be fiscally responsible, but overall money problems for every day expenses.
Reporter Rachel Wolfe concluded that contributing factors to dropped spending included a difficult job market, student loans, and a particularly high credit card delinquency rate among those aged 18 to 29.
That’s exactly why I love [email protected]. It pays to be patient.
there are also almost no new games worth even looking at anymore. There are some, but they are quite rare
In the AAA space, sure
Modern games fucking suck. Start making good shit if you want people to buy them.
Also fuck the useless malware anticheats. Do it server side if you want to be even mildly effective or fuck off.
Playing indie games only until so-called AAA get their shit together, if ever . . .
I miss the the Battlefield 3-4 days for large scale shooters. Everything since has been complete trash. Battlebit is terrible, it’s not even similar.
I’m not going to get that kind of game from an indie developer unfortunately. If it happens I’ll be there.
1942 was the last good battlefield game
Shit I miss Battlefield 2, that game was awesome. Havent touched that series since 3, its straight garbage.
I totally get it. I have like 10k hours in Planetside 2 :/
What? You don’t want to play another indie rogulile/meta-commentaty rpg? How about a ‘deep’ story that they plagiarized from a kids’ show?
Y’all, this market is beyond saturated. And the AI gaming people are flOOOoding the space with more and more stuff.
In terms of a fun way to spend an hour or two, or a few go-to games, there’s unlimited options, many free or free enough. Meanwhile, everyone churning out titles expects full attention and wishlist and dropping $50 on them for simply existing.
I don’t really follow current games. Is there actually a huge increase of AI games?
There are also some games with active modding communities that can be played basically forever without getting boring.
Even without modding I have in the last couple of years found myself mainly in a cycle of playing the same emergent gameplay (were the game-space and/or game characters are random) games, one game at a time until I get bored then the next and the next until eventually I’m not bored of the earlier played games anymore and start it again.
These are mostly Indie titles like Factorio, Rimworld and even The Lone Dark in free mode.
The curated experience - which is what most of the AAA stuff is - just doesn’t have this infinite replayability.
Is Rimworld worth it? I’ve seen quite a lot of it, but it looks hard to get into (and it’s really expensive for an indie game).
It’s basically a survival management game where the skills of the peons you control are random and the terrain and broader world are procedurally generated.
Whilst the graphics are simple, the actual gameplay is solid and interesting with enough depth to keep you interested for many hours, The randomly generated per-game terrain and peons means that even though one can get bored after playing for tens of hours (maybe a bit over 100h), after a couple of months playing something else Rimworld is interesting again because whilst the game mechanics don’t change between games (hence to a point you do “crack the game”), the game space is different for every game hence the situation your colony finds itself in is different too,
If you like that survival and/or management games it’s well worth it if you can get it for 20 bucks or so.
As for the DLCs, I don’t think they actually add enough to be worth it.
Thanks for the review, that’s helpful! How much micromanagement does the game do? Does automation exist?
Important point with the DLCs, that’s really good to know!
You don’t control your peons, you mainly define zones were certain things should happen and the peons go and do it.
Zones can be for very low level explicit things (such as “cut all trees in this area” or “mine these iron nodes”) or broader activities (for example defining an area for cultivation of a specific plant, were the peons will automatically seed and sow, and you don’t even have to assigned specific peons to it).
There are a few single-action commands (say, toggle this machine ON/OFF) but again they’re not peon-specific (you just signal that the machine needs to be toggled ON or OFF and somebody will get around to do it),
You can force a specific peon to do a specific action just once, but it’s seldom used or useful.
You do normally control your peons directly for warfare, though.
In practice, you vaguely control who does which kind of things and with which priority via a control board where you define priorities per type of activity and per-peon, so basically a high-level management tool.
My impression is that there is a little bit of micromanagement but very little.
Feels a bit like the 80s market crash. Too many low quality games flooding market.
The seven seas are way more friendly
oh they are talking about AAA and AAAA games, so then they are not buying/playing fewer games but moved to the indie scene.
Not just Gen Z lol. People don’t have money, games are a luxury, luxuries are the first to go when you need to stretch your cash. Not that complicated.
I have money for games…but NONE of it is going to any company that makes me scream AAAAA…or when they charge 40+ for a game. screw em.
even their 100$ trash at 95% off…hell no. that’s even worse cause you know the game is extra shit.
all my money goes directly to Indy devs. games are actually fun, made with passion and they don’t try to screw me every chance they get. I stopped with big title garbage like 6-7 years ago. never going back.
this mentality even applies to all my shopping. I don’t buy crap anymore and I wish more people would do the same.
But then how can you create an artificial divide and pit one generation against another?
The article says for other age groups it dropped single digit percent points, so yeah it is mostly Gen Z in this case.
even if we do, the cost doesnt justify the poor quality of some of these games.
Also modern games are trash, that’s kind of a big one you are missing
As a old member of Gen Z, i can definitely say the prices aren’t helping. A lot of people in my age group just don’t work from what i’ve seen, so with 70$ and sometime 80$ games they aren’t going to be buying many. On top of that, and this may just be the people i’ve exposed myself too, but most of them don’t want longer experiences. They’d rather plop down with something like FF14 or Mario Kart and play that over and over and over again. That’s not a bad thing, but i definitely think it’s not helping. And like i said, this might just be the people i expose myself too.
True, I enjoy games like Spelunky and old arcade racers a lot more. Play for a bit and leave it. No story to worry about.
I can definitely get that. I like to keep a good few games on hand i can just hop into after a long day, it’s nice to be able to kick back with smaller games even if my favorites are always bigger story games.
It also helps that most indie titles don’t need the latest and greatest hardware. I have a budget laptop and it runs most indie games well at 1080p.
As someone who’s first laptop was a Dual Core with 6GB of RAM, I appreciated when Indie Games ran amazingly on it. It was a life saver
Judging by the comments, reading the article seems to be a lost art. Here’s the image for y’all:
It’s very specifically about 18-24 year olds, compared to last year, with video games seeing the steepest decrease.
You can stop complaining about games being soulless, unless you want to claim that wasn’t a problem last year. Well, you can, but it’s unrelated then. Compared to last year, this age group has felt the need to cut back at everything more so than anyone else.
Almost like they have no money to spend after rent and food.
We’re headed for a crash, and the junior positions are the first ones that CEOs think they can replace with LLMs (they can’t but that will take a few years to bite them in the ass)
To be fair, the kids are just a pretty good indicator of where this whole boat is headed. Someone who’s been adulting for a while probably has savings and is willing to burn some of those to keep doing the hobby they like, especially when they’re invested with hardware or friendships that exist through gaming.
