Back in the early 90s I would walk into a store, buy a game that came in a box with a manual, take it home and it was mine.
I bought the 1st Civilization like this. I still have it. No Internet needed.
That’s the way it should be. All the online, dlc, mini boxes, group play, create online accounts…fuck all that shit.
Games are 70 and 80 dollars now. Young people can’t afford them. I can’t either, but I would refuse to pay that price regardless, anyway.
I don’t need the 7th iteration of the same game dressed up with new graphics for the price they’re charging.
That’s because most of them are playing F2P video games on their mobile devices.
Funny how that happens when people don’t have any money.
And when so much of gaming is shit.
Honestly, this has been a great year for games. The past 5 years have been pretty great.
Agreed. Many good games dropped this year. Expedition 33, death stranding 2, oblivion remastered.
Dark Souls 4 DLC was p great.
I guess it’s the over 25s buying all those Switch 2s then?
youtubers and twitch streamers who spent the past 6 months complaining about how games shouldn’t be that expensive
Even then I knew they were all still going to buy them.
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.
And now BL3 is literally $3 on steam. I paid fucking $60 or $70 for it. Whatever it was.
I lost my last nerve with Gearbox when I had to figure out how to remove ads in a Borderlands game. No way they’re going to subject me to an ad for a game I would have otherwise bought.
Don’t forget about microtransactions, they might be a significant portion of the decline.
Older games are better plus gamers can play all our existing games.
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
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.
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.
Give me a call when they’re in the bargain bin years from now.
If they’re still functional, thankfully there’s the Stop Killing Games movement.
I love the movement that has gotten. I’m cheering for it.
People are dumping money still, revenue isn’t shrinking
Yeah, I think the decline is a drop in a bucket considering. I know plenty of people still buying the Switch 2 etc. on launch day.
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.
They’re charging more money for lower quality games. Glad less people are buying.
Looks at:
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AAA games costing 100€+ between base game and season pass.
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Online services on consoles constantly raising prices.
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Consoles that, over the time cost more instead of less.
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Wages frozen in time for years.
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Rest of unrelated to videogames stuff but that drain people’s wages.
I WONDER WHY YOUNG PEOPLE SPEND LESS IN VIDEOGAMES…
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 $80 for the new assassin’s creed?
Or even better, play an old game that you still haven’t played. I can get titanfall 2 for the price of a coffee and play it for the first time if I’m craving for a good AAA fps.
The single player is pretty good in that. It’s definitely worth trying out.
Being in the giant mech doesn’t feel any different than not being in it though. That’s my only complaint.
I remember at the time titanfall came out, the mechs moving like a human was a selling point. I do agree though it is odd to experience when its not a novelty.
Oh shiiiit, do that and come back and talk to us when you get to the time travel level.
Are we just in the phase of the medium where technology isn’t the defining quality. It would be slightly weird to try to stay at the forefront of, say, novels without any regard for reading classics. Why shouldn’t games be the same?
There’s also lots of (frequently not even that) old games that I never got around to/never heard about that I can now get on sale for 5$ or whatever, so it’s not always a matter of replaying.
I’m current stuck in a long term cycle of mainly Project Zomboid, Factorio, Valheim, Oxygen Not Included, The Lone Dark and Rimworld, were when I’m fed up of playing the last of them, it’s been long enough since I played the first one that it’s once interesting to play it.
Even when I manage to be fed up with playing all of them at any one point, I still have other progression games with complex emergent gameplay (often but not always games which have algorithmically generated game areas) like Kenshi. 7 Days to Die or OpenTTD that pull me in and if that fails, I can always pick up one of the old open world roleplay jewels such as Skyrim and play that.
I’ve barelly tried anything else in the last couple of years and of those only Oxygen Not Include was the only one with any lasting power and I picked that one years ago.
It’s not even because I can’t afford it (though out of principl I refuse to pay more than €20 for a game) - whenever I try an AAA game nowadays (always games that came out years ago) it’s almost invariably an inferior experience that either feels too constrained or doesn’t have enough gameplay variety and complexity to be fun for long.
I replay TLOU, TLOU 2 and Days Gone yearly.
I used to play new big AAA games, but none of them seem interesting these days.
I’d rather replay old games that are top tier than waste time on mediocre new crap.
Just (re) started Dead Space after not playing it for 10-15 years. Still good, still enjoy, why buy when I can just replay games I’ve forgotten the story to?
Same for Control a few months ago… And I’m sure others.
I am playing a new character in Elder Scrolls 3 - Morrowind right now. The modding community for that game is so good, with OpenMW (a open source engine rebuild) and the tool “umo” it was so easy to install a curated mod list that not only upscaled the graphics but also extended the game with not only a huge part of the Morrowind mainland but also parts of cyrodiil and Skyrim. So much new content and places to explore now!
You wouldnt happen to be on linux would you?
Yes, I am using Arch btw 😜🤣 Sorry but I couldn’t resist the opportunity 😁
Nice! I am too, I’ll have to check out the modpack loader thingy that sounds fantastic!
It is here: https://modding-openmw.gitlab.io/umo/
Especially when most games that’ve come out this year run like shit, and a new graphics card is nearly a rent payment
Studies conducted at my desk and on my couch have also found a downward trend in video game quality.
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!)
BLS jobs report was a beat, +140k jobs and unemployment down a shade. I agree with you on the themes but it doesn’t help to cherry pick data.
The BLS jobs estimate report is utterly garbage data.
Go look back over the last year or two.
Look at how many times, and how many jobs they revised down from the report 1 or 2 months prior.
All the idiots that watch Jim Cramer for financial advice are the same idiots that never bother to follow up on the BLS revisions.
Also, the BLS jobs estimate is an estimate that goes through a whole bunch of layers of dependency on other statistics like estimated populations growth.
Meanwhile the ADP is much more directly based on actual payrolls, from actual money going out to actual employees.
You should maybe learn how to actually compare the methodologies behind various sources of data before you accuse someone of cherry picking.
…
Also the unemployment rates that are widely reported on don’t count people who’ve been unemployed so long that they fall out of the labor force.
In our modern economy, if you fall off the treadmill, you stay unemployed for that long, you’ll likely never get hired in that field again, or at least not without having to start out at an entry level or junior position, because of how absurd companies are with job requirements, how every job opening has 1000 applicants in 72 hrs, how something like 2/3rds of those job openings are fake and will never hire anyone.
What are you talking about? They’re both estimates extrapolated from samples. I think most statisticians would prefer stratified sampling over one company’s payrolls processing, but whatever. Maybe chuds would argue that ADP is so much more efficient/accurate because it’s outside of the “swamp” of govt, it’s certainly an independent data point. I mean I agree with you in that BLS is not reliable either. Real time economics is hard.
If you honestly preferred ADP all along and will continue to espouse it’s superiority when it next contradicts your view rather than confirming it (as it will because data are noisy) then more power to you.
Well now you’ve met a statistician, a person with an Econ degree, specialization in Econometrics who is telling you the BLS numbers have been garbage for 2 years, based off of how many revisions they have to keep doing, and the magnitude of those adjustments.
I’ve been a professional data analyst at multiple large companies for years, I’m not going to explain this further unless you want to pay me for the full 40 page methodology breakdown.
Real time economics is not hard for me, it was my career until I retired.
Damn near every single measurable metric in the US economy beyond what’s in the most easy to consume, most non specialist oriented media is screaming that everything is going tits up.
Hey when was the last time the Fed had to significantly jump into the Repo market to bail it out?
Oh, right, it was this past week.
I’m not going to bother to list out every single indicator/methodology I consider because 1) I’d break the lemmy comment post character limit (its 10k, btw) and 2) I’m used to being paid for such detail.
Ah an economist, say no more fam.
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.
Don’t forget all the online requirements with accounts even if you want to play single player, and constant server issues on launch that seem to happen with every game now because none of them allow community servers anymore.
The death of community servers is why I stopped playing multiplayer.
The gaming landscape was just so much better back when communities were able to self-host and moderate before matchmaking and corporate automated moderation became the norm.
I still play multiplayer, but on games that still support community servers like Minecraft, Enshrouded, Arma 3, Space Engineers…
How has Enshrouded been doing? I haven’t been able to get on my PC in almost a year and only got to play it on initial release.
It’s good, there’s been a few major updates adding new zones, better NPCs, animals, more gear/weapons, and so on…
At least it is still being updated and just happy to hear it hasn’t gone dark like most other Early Access titles.
Yeah they’re making steady progress on major updates, and releasing patches for bugs and tweaks in between.
Yup, no way to figured this one out.
Also, the games market was brought up a lot by the global pandemic and had to come down eventually.
Free games like fortnite
Also, with the speed that games have been coming out the last 20 years, there’s always something on sale to play
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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.
Nitpick: It’s probably not the devs so much as the capitalist owners and management collaborators. I’d guess most of the people making the games would be happy to have someone play their game at all. It’s not like they typically get a cut of the profits (again: capitalism)
It’s the publishers. They’re in control of any discounts or sales. Steam sale or otherwise.
Eh. I know what all PvP centric games turn into unless you’re willing to devote a fuckton of hours into it and get into a great guild. I’ll pass.
I will say though, if you’re the kind of guy who likes MMOs and RPGs (like me) you’ll love dune.
I used to play a ton of RuneScape back in the day, and recently I’ve been playing Eve and Star Citizen but dune is just a better game in every possible way than those three. I’ve been so obsessed that I had to uninstall it this week so I could get to sleep on time for work haha
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
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.
+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.
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.
because of our kleptogeriocracy
Because of our what?
thieving old ruling class.
Rule by elderly thieves. Klepto-geri-ocracy.
Old people be stealing
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.
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.
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.
Yep they definitely missed the boat on that one. Which is why I think they are so keen on turning Xbox into a platform. With how PC hardware is going, they have a chance to take back some market from Valve and maybe convert people from Playstation as well. The risk here is that they can’t sell the “consoles” at a loss, so they will be undercut by Sony by a significant amount of money. But their answer to that is probably “it doesn’t matter, everything is an Xbox now, the console is for the enthusiast market”.
Bold strategy, we’ll see if they can pull it off.
Ends meat*
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
