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 don’t need the 7th iteration of the same game dressed up with new graphics for the price they’re charging.
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.
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.
And even today’s potato PCs can run old AAA titles just fine.
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?
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.
Especially when most games that’ve come out this year run like shit, and a new graphics card is nearly a rent payment
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/
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.
Studies conducted at my desk and on my couch have also found a downward trend in video game quality.
Also, the games market was brought up a lot by the global pandemic and had to come down eventually.
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!)
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?
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.
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.
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.
£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.
£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.
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, with the speed that games have been coming out the last 20 years, there’s always something on sale to play
Free games like fortnite
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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.
I got shadow of mordor on a huge discount and it still barely felt worth it.
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.
And now BL3 is literally $3 on steam. I paid fucking $60 or $70 for it. Whatever it was.
Depression has me not so interested in playing games anymore. Reading instead. Gaming is losing its magic for me. I’m 36.
It’s fun how when you could really most use a reliable distraction you start to not be able to find joy in things you used to.
That’s when you play PvP games that piss you off so much sadness goes to anger, which can be a nice distraction.
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.
Exactly, picked up RDR2, AC Odyssey and Bloodborne for about $45 recently. This constant pressure to move people toward a subscription model only works if there’s trust. Too much bullshit = shrinking sales
I picked up three games for mad cheap that I’ve pirated for a long time. I’ll give you money devs, if the price is right.
I’m a bit younger, though not a lot.
I all but stopped buying games because Epic and Amazon give so many away for free.
I’ve got like 500 free games that I haven’t even installed once.
The only time I’d actually pay for a game is if it’s a special one I want, and they’ve gotten few and far between.
I’m sure it has nothing to do with shitty half baked $70 games
- 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?
- Games locked behind exclusivity deals begging/forcing to install multiple launchers to play different games
- Major game-dev doesnt innovate and have forgot how to be imaginative.
- Games as services is priority cause it brings money to corpos
Thankfully, indie-dev is epic right this moment! Lot’s of lesser known but very fun games coming out.
Not fixed later, fixed maybe.
and the microtransactions inside them. and the underwhelming day 1 dlc.
with no new ideas and safe bets only.
As a rule, I never buy games on release. From everything I hear, you pay twice the price to get an unfinished game in most cases.
I put them on my wishlist, keep an eye on the reviews and depending on those I decide how much of a discount it will require for me to actually buy the game. Usually I end up getting them at least a year later and/or at least at 50% off.
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.
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).
But you can get hundreds of hours from a f2p game, so that’s the competition $70 games have. Then there’s older triple a titles that are cheaper, and there’s so many that it’s not possible to have played all of them. Then epic giveaways, game bundles, indies, etc.
And price increases push more consumers away from impulse purchases. And that can lead to them becoming patient gamers once they see not buying at release isn’t a big deal.
Sure… But the existence of f2p games doesn’t really affect how much I personally value an hour’s worth of video game entertainment.
It should also be noted that companies don’t make f2p games out of the kindness of their hearts, they are making money somehow, and if it’s not through microtransactions, then you are the product.
Paid games hasn’t kept them from not having aggressive microtransactions themselves and sometimes worse. And there’s so many sources of games now beyond big publishers. The gaming landscape just isn’t the same as in the past that it can get away with setting whatever price they want and expect to turn a profit. The old hour of value stance isn’t as relevant, and is more likely to lead to bombs even amongst triple A publishers with their vast marketing budgets with that attitude. There’s way more options now that people don’t have to settle.
Nope. All video games are bad, overpriced etc. same with movies as tv shows.
And we all have the right to the creative work of others. So pirate everything. That’ll fix it! /s
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.
Can’t wait till the indie wave wakes up the realization that there is a goldmine of 90s games that were incredible. Star control 2 for one could probably be mistaken for a new indie hit nowadays.
A new Star Control is coming up, made by the OG developers. I am very much looking forward to it.
Nice! Wish listing now!
I’ve been playing X-Wing. The mad lads who built XWVM have essentially modernized the game and got it working on and with modern hardware, while strictly preserving its feel. It’s amazing.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
