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.
People are dumping money still, revenue isn’t shrinking
Depression has me not so interested in playing games anymore. Reading instead. Gaming is losing its magic for me. I’m 36.
I said in another thread but I’ve been unemployed for a while now. Even jobs I’m referred to my old coworkers aren’t giving me interviews. If capital wants me to spend money, they have to pay me money first. Until then, fuck them.
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.
greedy devs
Publishers, mostly.
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
60-80 for the base half-finished game plus 30+ for DLC, console extras
I know I’d rather wait a month than spend $40+ extra for the privilege of being an unpaid beta tester
Might as well wait for them to finish the game and release it as a game of the year edition, whatever that means anymore
kinda stupid that it isnt called complete edition
i think the impact of all the free games shows too
i removed a bunch of shit from my wishlist because it was free on epic amazon or gog at some point. my heroic games launcher library keeps growing and i dont see the point of buying games when i have this huge backlog of things i actually want to play. notable exceptions to the no buy are extreme high quality outliers like baldurs gate and cyberpunk(dlc) and niche indie games i want to support. those i buy on steam (or gog)
at the same time i hope i only cost epic and amazon money
Yep, I know a lot of people who would balk at buying games but have no qualms dropping more then 100$ per month on gacha games.
Video gamesspending by young Americans is droppingFTFY
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
Mayhaps the former young Americans are now aging into, uh… being not young Americans? Mayhaps said former young Americans also don’t have children because this entire county’s culture is all about feeding all the money to 1%ers yacht purchases?
I honestly don’t trust any “adult” who’s my age that doesn’t play viddy games, like what are you into for entertainment? A lamp?
I honestly don’t trust any “adult” who’s my age that doesn’t play viddy games,
This is like the modern version of, “Don’t trust anyone over 30”
the people around 25-35 that dont play vidya are either into extreme sports outside all the time (adrenaline junkie) or are fat fucks who watch every show on the planet with 100 bucks a month in subscriptions (sedated paypig)
oh and the other option is exhausted parents whose only wish would be uninterrupted sleep
Show me the Lämp, brother
Wing noises intensify.
I rarely buy new AAA games. Mostly indie titles and heavily-discounted AAA games.
Every game or movie that comes out now is a reboot/remake. Why would I buy that? I already bought that.
Definitely not true in the case of games.
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.
for barely 40 USD of content
This is completely relative, and different for everyone… But I have a hard time backing up statements like this given that it costs nearly $20 to go to the movie theater and watch a 90 minute movie. If I can get like 40-150 hours from a $70 game… That’s really not that bad in terms of value. In my opinion.
I think we have been a little bit spoiled (that isn’t to say that video game publishers aren’t greedy corporations that over charge to increase their profit margins, of course they do and fuck them for it).
its half assed, like a something switch console game of nintendo has been doing since 2020, which turned me away from the console altogether, i stuck to pc , but not high end games. my bro bought a brand new switch when they were selling new variations but he has barely played since.
The day of the backlog has come! Portable PC enjoyers rejoice!
Ok but doesn’t every tracking company pretend they don’t track kids’ habits? The whole industry is built on fraud.
This should be the real story
I echo this a developer with a top app on the Meta Quest. My USA sales have fallen off a cliff, while other regions like Asia and Europe have increased a little.
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.
because of our kleptogeriocracy
Because of our what?
thieving old ruling class.
Rule by elderly thieves. Klepto-geri-ocracy.
+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.
Ends meat*
the Playstation 2 launched at $299 USD.
Not disagreeing with you, but with inflation that’s about $558 as of this comment.
Inflation, yeah. The thing that has absolutely never been applied to wages?
This, people still trying to feed their families with 7.25, not out of laziness or refusal to get “real job” but desperation
“You’re paid what you’re worth!111!!11”
Bitch if human beings were paid what they were worth, poverty would actually be a moral failing instead of a societial one.
Not disagreeing with you
I hear about these cases of inflation, like the fact a pack of gum cost 15 trillion Zimbabwe dollars, or immediately after WWII the German…reichmarke or whatever they called it, was so worthless it took a wheelbarrow full to buy a loaf of bread.
Where do I get a wheelbarrow full of uselessly inflated USD? It’s not actually inflation, is it?
You’re thinking of hyperinflation. If that happens in the US you can have your wheelbarrow of dollars. Inflation makes money worth less, hyperinflation makes money worthless.
I bet you money right now that the next Xbox will be the best selling Xbox ever.
If I understand the situation, they’re rebranding an Asus ROG handheld, which I imagine isn’t going to outsell the Steam Deck or whatever the thing Lenovo is shipping with both Windows or SteamOS on, because they’re late to the game and they’ll fuck it up somehow, and I give 50/50 odds that there will be an announcement that they’re cancelling the next home console launch.
That’s not the next Xbox I mean, but it’s a glimpse at it. It’s clear that the direction this is going is that Xbox moving forward is going to be a Steam competitor and a launcher at the same time. The next Xbox console will be a prebuilt PC. A literal prebuilt PC running windows that can play Steam, PC games and Gamepass at current Series X quality or a little bit better priced somewhere between $700 to $900. Maybe a Series S type performance for $400-500. Build me a PC with similar performance at that price. You can’t because the GPU market is insane. I’m not saying there’s no pitfalls, but if they pull it off they will sell these things like crazy.
It’s funny because like 20 years ago or whenever Xbox launched I was like “why don’t they capitalize on the fact that they own windows? The platform everyone plays games on. Why are they competing with themselves?”
Hypothesis: businesses are run by idiots and people whose contradictory incentives create behavior indistinguishable from idiots.
They were thinking about that back then, various people have said it, but I think they were constrained by costs and technical limitations. Bill Gates certainly wanted Xbox and windows gaming to be a unified platform. I mean look at Valve, they had the Steam Machine ages ago and they flopped, but you can be sure that they will be much popular this time around.
True, I’m definitely doing arm chair analysis. If I was in charge, I probably wouldn’t have entered the console market at all. I’d probably have tried to build steam. That had to be easier if you own the OS, too. On the other hand, they utterly fucked up “Games For Windows! Live” or whatever it was called.
I could probably build a gaming PC that matches the Series S for $500 with an AMD APU, some Ryzen thing with integrated graphics, no discrete GPU. The Steam Deck makes it work in a handheld format, I can do it in a PC case. Or, go buy used. There’s gonna be a lot of perfectly game capable machines being sold off because they won’t run Win 11. Slap Linux + Steam on there and you’re gaming.
Ok, so you think the mass market likes buying used stuff? Because as far as I’m aware the average consumer would rather buy a new lower end device than a used higher end device.
But yes the next Xbox has already been teased as running an AMD chip that will be sued across form factors , so you get where they are coming from. They are not about to let Valve and Linux run with the PC market, which continues to grow while the console market continues to shrink.
next Xbox
If it’s really a PC, I bet AMD customized Strix Halo (their 40 CU APU) for Microsoft instead of doing a fully custom chip like before.
It’d save them money (as custom chip tapeouts are 9 figures last I heard). I bet Microsoft couldn’t help themselves, heh.
