Topic: Consumers were mostly playing older games in 2023, report suggests

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/consumers-were-mostl...

This is very interesting and slightly worrying data. It points out that even though revenue for the industry grew, less publishers and developers shared in the overall profit. Lines up with a stagnating industry.

I dunno what to think of it, much less say about it. But still interesting data regardless.

Well duh, most major recent releases are ports or remasters. At least on Switch, the most-played current console.
It’s hard to play new stuff when the major publishers just keep rehashing old games. 😵‍💫

I mean, a lot of the biggest games are ones that have stuck around from 6+ years ago, so that makes sense to me. To me its less worrying and more just inevitable with systems having countless games from the past readily available. If you have the entirety of popular gaming readily available, why would you only play new releases. Especially since some of the most beloved games from last year were updates and remakes of older games. ESPECIALLY when a new game is more likely than ever to be botched, when game publishers don't seem to care too often nowadays.

It is more worrying that this reflects other mediums, especially music.

Not sure I agree on music, there is a ceiling on popularity as the internet has divided everything up into bits but cool music has never been the most chart successful (also not related to popularity itself but it's harder to making a living being a musician as no one buys music now thinning the heard) however this year I've seen two acts put an exclamation mark on how massive they have got in a short space of time. Sleep Token an emo-indie-prog-metal band who I saw play in a half empty club 4 years ago have now sold out two nights at the O2 Arena plus Yungblud a cringe (but well meaning) pop-punk singer who is doing a massive Milton Keynes Bowl show which is a venue normally played by the likes of Muse and Foo Fighters. Alt music is the strongest it's been in years imo with stuff like IDLES, Bad Omens, Spiritbox, Maneskin etc breaking through big after a boring few years with the likes of Imagine Dragons and Lewis Capaldi.

Saying that though grassroots music is in trouble, lots of small venues are closing due to prices going up and with Brexit it has made touring harder preventing smaller acts getting more shows.

Could it be that older and live-service games are more popular amongst younger gamers? The games listed certainly seem to be those associated with that demographic.

Younger gamers are typically time-rich and money-poor so would spend more time on relatively few, and inexpensive, games.

Quite different from people who buy games day one, who are more common on these forums, for example.

@Rambler @jump @kkslider5552000
Yeah, I'd argue music is entirely different. Gaming is currently going through a phase where the mid-tier developer is being squeezed out of the industry. The end result is a lot of very safe, very high budget, generally bland releases. Risk is high so publishers have more power than ever. Indie developers exist, so in that sense it's similar to music, but the bar is still relatively high even for indies

The same IS true for music but the driving force for music is a change in the discovery/distribution model. The gatekeepers are gone, the gates are wide open. It's the death of the mono-culture. And sure, it's tougher for artists to get big these days. But that's more because the only people who can be big are those who were big before we swung the gates wide open

There's more interesting music than ever and interesting music can find a market in a way it couldn't before. It's just that market is heavily fractured and Joe average is still living in the early 2010s

@Buizel Yeah, it mostly looks like a live-service thing to me.

Most of those games might seem old, if you're just looking at the original release date, but they've almost all been given substantial updates in the intervening period to the extent that they might as well be new games now.

So, it's mostly a case of people who enjoy things like Fortnite, Valorant and LoL spending money to get that new content, instead of buying new games.

I've been playing more older games as of recent, mainly because newer games just don't do it for me as much as they used to. I'm a relatively young person (21), and a lot of games from the past were games I wasn't around to play, or too young to enjoy. Recently just beat the original Final Fantasy 7, and I feel like I walked away from that game having enjoyed it more than I did with something like Final Fantasy XVI.

This isn't me saying that "New bad, old good," as there are newer games that I enjoy. I loved Xenoblade 3, and I somehow enjoyed NieR Reincarnation despite it being a mobile game. I'm just not a fan of a lot of the newer games that are releasing now. Especially the Games as a Service games, like Animal Crossing New Horizons or Fortnite. Games that feel like they're incomplete or that you have to wait for the creators to trickle in content in order to keep you "engaged." While that works for a lot of players, I tend to find that it pulls me out of a game. I'd rather just have all the content when I purchase something- rather than wait months for something that really should've been there from the start.

I am glad to see people are more in my position nowadays btw. I didn't mean to mostly stop playing brand new games necessarily, but I slowly was more and more behind on new games as the Wii U era went on (both because and regardless of the system's library), and I got the Switch only when Smash came out AND the Switch is really good for playing old games AND the other systems I play aren't current gen so it just turned out that way. Also doesn't help I've not done as well keeping up with indie games since those are most of the new games worth playing.

That's why I make my annual thread about what games people played rather than just focusing on the games that came out in one particularly year.

I've been doing nothing BUT playing older games more than newer ones. Been 3 months since I've been doing that. And I haven't got a desire to get any of the newer title that got released recently. Not that I'm complaining or anything...

As a member of this site I'm obviously an obsessive Nintendo fan and keep up with the news on new Switch releases, but even I only buy a small handful of newly released games each year. I don't think it's at all surprising that people in general spend most of their time on older games, seeing as most people probably don't pay attention to every new release and the vast majority of games available are not new releases.

I don't even think the average Joe living in the past is a new thing either, it's very Simpsons meme. It's been foreshadowed since the 90s yet people act surprised music isn't the exact same as when they were teens.

I've given it a thought before and I think it's really down to two things;

Music changes even within a subgenre whilst people expect [insert teenage favourite band] mark 2 like say if you're a metal fan where it starts off Black Sabbath, then it evolves into thrash metal like Metallica and Slayer, then onto nu-metal like Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park, then metalcore got big with Bring Me The Horizon and Parkway Drive to right now with baddiecore is the major yoof metal with Spiritbox and Sleep Token so the generation into Metallica or Black Sabbath look at the likes of Bring Me The Horizon and Spiritbox and dismiss it as not metal because it's simply not Slayer v2. You can apply the same to punk of The Sex Pistols>The Offspring>My Chemical Romance>Yungblud or indie with The Velvet Underground>The Smiths>The Stone Roses>The Killers>The 1975 etc.

The other things is simply how people are exposed to music, back in you Grand-Pappy's day watching Ed Sullivan or Top Of The Pops was how you got exposed to the big acts, then in your Dad's day it was watching MTV but now kids are finding their music via Spotify and social media which with the algorithms means it shows people what they want. If you want your nostalgia music it will give you nostalgia but if you want current new music if will give you new music so people are getting less exposed to both the old and new.

@Anti-Matter give the article a read. It's not a lot of people are playing retro games now, they are playing live service modern games like Fortnite, Rocker League and GTAV which were released over 6 years ago.

It's a minority of people in a hobby who will actively explore its depths, with the majority of people opting to stick with a handful of ultra-successful mainstream titles. Same is true with film, music, literature, etc.

That means the vast majority of releases in any given year are selling to and competing for a tiny fraction of the market.

@Rambler At first I thought you misspelt Death From Above 1979. lol

Just gave them a listen, yeah you're right they are quality! They seem to be still active too.

@jump
Yes, but that wasn't quite my point. My point was more that because we're now in a "post radio" age the music mono-culture is dead. When there was a huge hit in decades past everyone would hear it. It'd be unavoidable. That's not true anymore

And as a result there aren't anywhere near as many breakout artists anymore. People are going on about Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran etc but these are not new artists. They've been in the charts for well over a decade. I mean sure, there are viral hits and one hit wonders but most of the artists people congregate around gained their mass audience in the pre-spotify era. Newer artists can and do find an audience, finding an audience is easier than ever, but the audiences are heavily fractured and will never be as big as they once were

And to bring it back to the topic, this most definitely isn't the force happening to gaming. If anything gaming is going through the opposite. Gaming is being driven more and more by the gatekeepers. The biggest games are increasingly the ones that have the biggest marketing budgets. And it's dudes in suits who decide what those games are

I'd personally argue that's true for the actual biggest games but that more games trying to use marketing to get to even close to that level of success are notably failing at doing that, while random other games most didn't expect to be huge are the actual successes.

In my case, I play old games because I can't afford new ones.

It's almost as if capitalism and rampant inequality actually does have negative consequences.

Why did music streaming start? Because of piracy and the music industry wanting to make more money.

Why did piracy start? Because the music industry was built on a practice of packaging 2 or 3 half-decent songs on an album otherwise full of dross. Why did the industry do that? To make more money.

The average music consumer didn't feel they were getting value for their hard-earned money, so turned to Napster et al to just download the decent songs they wanted and ignore the dross they didn't want.

The cinema industry is struggling because it wanted to make more money and pushed customers too far. Cineworld ticket prices before Covid were usually around £12 for one adult ticket. Covid happened, people had to do without cinema for a bit, and now ticket prices are down to £6 because everyone was fed up of getting ripped off at the cinema, stopped going and stream at home instead.

Average people very simply won't/can't go on paying more and more for increasingly derivative content when they're not seeing a proportionate increase in income. It gets kinda impossible at some point.

Wages have stagnated for years, yet corporations must have more of our money so must push prices up.

Sony and Microsoft have spent years over-investing in the games industry, buying up exclusivity in one form or another, while most likely selling hardware at a loss. The average consumer cannot support it. We need affordable innovation (and a pay rise). What do Sony do? Fork out x hundred million dollars on another Spider-Man game. What do Microsoft do? Fork out x billion dollars for more Call of Duty. How do they expect us to pay them enough to make that worthwhile? We are stretched, bro!