There Will Be 3.2 Billion Gamers in 2022, But Revenue Set To Fall for First Time in 15 years (techspot.com) 46
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're old enough to remember when gaming was considered more of a niche pastime, especially among those over the age of sixteen, it might bring a smile to your face to know that 3.2 billion people, almost half the world's population, will play games this year. They'll spend a combined total of $184.4 billion on their hobby, and while that is down slightly compared to last year, it's the result of the pandemic-induced gaming boom of 2020/21.
Newzoo's latest Global Games Market Report shows that the number of people playing games around the world is up 4.6% this year. That's especially impressive given how more people were gaming during the lockdowns when stay-at-home entertainment, such as video games and streaming, exploded. Not only were more people trying games for the first time, but lapsed players were also returning. The pandemic also saw a huge jump in games revenue -- growth between 2020 and 2022 was $43 billion more than Newzoo predicted. Unlike player numbers, that hasn't been sustained post-lockdown, with the $184 billion figure down -4.3% YoY; the first decline in 15 years. However, it's important to note that gaming has still managed to weather 2022's economic turbulence better than many other industries.
Newzoo's latest Global Games Market Report shows that the number of people playing games around the world is up 4.6% this year. That's especially impressive given how more people were gaming during the lockdowns when stay-at-home entertainment, such as video games and streaming, exploded. Not only were more people trying games for the first time, but lapsed players were also returning. The pandemic also saw a huge jump in games revenue -- growth between 2020 and 2022 was $43 billion more than Newzoo predicted. Unlike player numbers, that hasn't been sustained post-lockdown, with the $184 billion figure down -4.3% YoY; the first decline in 15 years. However, it's important to note that gaming has still managed to weather 2022's economic turbulence better than many other industries.
There are no games (Score:5, Insightful)
Make some AAA or at least double A games and you'll see your revenue going back up. You might have to spend some money advertising them because it's been so long since we got more than two or three a year people just aren't in the habit.
It doesn't help that 2 years in and you still can't buy a PS5 reliably for under $800. As a developer it makes it hard to make exciting new games when nobody can get the new hardware to speak of. But Nintendo is still doing interesting things on a bloody tegra one.
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The problem I have is I dropped $60 and I don't even have a game. Instead what I have is a pathetic excuse to spend more money. And my God the stuff they do the sports gamers shouldn't happen to a
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More like Neo Geo money! If memory serves me right, of the game machines of the 70's/early 80's, the 2600 never reached more than 25% household penetration. The home computers even less.
I sometimes p
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"It doesn't help that 2 years in and you still can't buy a PS5 reliably for under $800. As a developer it makes it hard to make exciting new games when nobody can get the new hardware to speak of"
With apologies to Mr. Berra - "Nobody plays on that console, it's too popular!"
The PS5 is trending just few million units behind PS4 at this point in its sales life and was leading in its first year, so I doubt anyone has made top level development decisions about supporting/not supporting based on sales.
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The problem is as a developer you can't just ignore the install base of PS4s because you can't count on your customers being able to go out and buy a PS5. So you're stuck constraining yourself to the old hardware with all the problems that go with that. File
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They can and will put out the next GTA title even if it's in a slow period because it's going to suck when it comes out and need shitloads of testing and patching, and they certainly aren't going to pay enough to do that during the prerelease period. We know this for sure because each GTA game has been buggier than the last.
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Everyone keeps trying to cram increasingly crummy and poorly made live services down our throats so they can sell us a skin that an intern knocked together in an afternoon for 10 bucks. You can get away with that with sports gamers because they're desperate to recreate TV broadcasts but there is a limit to how many skins in fortnite you're going to be able to sell the kids.
Make some AAA or at least double A games and you'll see your revenue going back up. You might have to spend some money advertising them because it's been so long since we got more than two or three a year people just aren't in the habit.
It doesn't help that 2 years in and you still can't buy a PS5 reliably for under $800. As a developer it makes it hard to make exciting new games when nobody can get the new hardware to speak of. But Nintendo is still doing interesting things on a bloody tegra one.
As much as I agree with your points, AAA or AA refers to the size of the budget, not the quality of the product. As we've seen over the last decade you can have AAA budgets but produce utter dross... Especially as a large percentage of the budget now goes on marketing.
If anything, to reverse the trend of skin hocking, loot boxes or day 0 DLC we need fewer AAA games. Games that have huge budgets also need to see huge returns on that budget. So everything is designed to maximise returns, finding a way to c
Steam runs very well on Linux... (Score:2, Informative)
18 years of Steam sales (Score:2)
I have so many unplayed games in my account that it will take me years to go through them and try them. Anytime I'm bored I try something old that is new to me before buying something. Maybe only 1 in 20 is any fun, but that should at least inform my decision making. (buying too many things that are cheap and have good screen shots)
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Ditto. No time to play. I do play a lot of free samplers like those free weekends.
Gaming got a lot more social ... (Score:2)
The trend I'm really noticing is that especially for the younger gaming crowd, it's a social event as much as anything else. A given game has to offer either competitive or cooperative game-play that works well with a group that's voice-chatting about what they're all doing in real-time.
That also means the cost of the game is a bigger issue than it used to be. (If the game costs $50 and someone's friends consist of several broke teens or 20-somethings, there's a good chance that title won't be chosen to pur
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It's more important that everyone in the social circle can participate than the game being one person's personal favorite/top-pick.
Sounds some mother fuckers need to get skoold by player 1. Don't like, get the fuck out.
Don't know how many a weekend were wasted on Halo cuz that was the only thing we really all had.
Y'know. This sounds like they should bring back true split screen. Less of a cost when only one copy is needed.
The reckoning... (Score:4, Funny)
All of the old paradigms have fallen. Expectations are sky high, judgement is harsh, willingness to pay up front is bottoming out.
Eventually we'll get what we collectively truly want - and that's evidenced in our choices. We clearly want freemium gaming. We want games for devices over games for anything else. We want games to be swiftly consumed and forgotten in the next eager cycle of the consumer awareness wheel.
The Marvel Mentality is here to stay in most forms of media. We are a consume-and-discard culture, through and through, and the more quickly something can be relegated into the dust heap of yesterday, the better.
I'm not condemning this state of being. It is what it is, and wishing for a sepia-tinged version of the past where the consumer was somehow "better" is pointless.
It gives me hope, though, when I see something like BTS. They might have been a a very modern phenomenon, but the music writers were fully steeped in, and deeply respectful of, the pop genres and acts that came before. There was plenty of substance behind that flash.
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"We" the collective. "I", the individual, am not particularly happy with it either.
Strategy Games (Score:2)
I take it you don't play strategy games. The successful ones have life cycles of 5 years or more nowadays with a combination of free and paid content releases coming after the initial release.
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I've been playing strategy games since the days of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. And you're right, there are exceptions. I also didn't address MMORPGs. But when you speak about macro trends, you have to generalize.
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I'd say single player CRPGs don't really fit what you describe either. Even the isometric indie ones are made to be played for ages.
In fact, nothing I currently play fits what you describe so while I kind of see what you're talking about out in the world it doesn't seem so common I'd paint it as the norm.
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I still play NWN2 and sometimes NWN. The game I really want would play like WOW or EQ or any number of rpgs that all basically "play" the same way but with a toolset to build my own adventures. A good one. Heck, the one the developers use.
We could call this game NWN3!
Games are trash these days (Score:3)
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That's part of the problem. The 60 bucks. Games cost 60 bucks. Because they have always costed 60 bucks. How much was a game 10 years ago? 60 bucks. How much 30 years ago? 60 bucks. That's the price tag of a game.
Games became much, much more expensive to make in those 30 years. Not just because inflation, but because we now have a lot more horsepower in those machines and those horses want to be fed. With better graphics, better sound, better AI, better level design, you name it. The tools got much better,
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But back then a AAA game might find a million buyers, netting them 60 million in revenue.
The market is much bigger these days, and a AAA title can find many millions of buyers. GTA5's revenue is measured in the billions (just in up front sales! not counting shark cards) despite only costing 60 dollars.
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Yes, this is why the price tag could stay at 60 for almost 30 years. Cost rose at about the same rate as revenue did. The problem is now that costs keep on rising while revenue plateaus off because there is no influx of new customers. Until now, that was pretty much what kept the price tag where it is, instead of having maybe half a million customers, you now have 50 million customers, so costs going up hundredfold was compensated by units sold.
That model does not work anymore.
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The market has stopped growing at the same pace it did in the early 2000s long ago. It got a new boost back in pandemic times when more people were sitting at home and didn't have anything else to do but play games, but everyone knew that this isn't gonna last.
You'll notice the advent of loot boxes, 0day DLCs, "season passes" and the like in the past 10 years or so. Which is also pretty much the time that sales numbers stopped growing. We have reached market saturation, like it or not. The cellphone gaming
Saw it coming (Score:2)
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Yeah, I'm grateful to be past the "games are for kids" mentality people used to have.
My favorite to hear that from were the twits who would sit around for hours watching other people play games (pro sports) while thinking those actually playing games of their own were engaging in the activities of children. There's no problem with being into pro sports mind you but to claim it's more "adult" than playing a video game is absurd.
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I thought that video game industry revenues were trouncing movies and music combined.
3.2 billion (Score:2)
But how many are real people rather than bots and dupes
Gamers? (Score:3)
Does playing Wordle make you a 'gamer'?
I guess the PHB with Solitaire on his Windows 95 box counts too?
3.2 billion...
playing a game != gamers (Score:2)
The gaming industry is in a bind (Score:4, Interesting)
On more fronts than one.
First, the price tag. How much does a AAA game cost? 60 bucks, right? Why? Well, because it's always been 60 bucks. And I'm not even kidding here, ever since the 1990s, the price tag for a AAA game was somewhere between 50 and 60 bucks. And so far, that model worked. Yes, games got more expensive to make. Way more expensive. Let's be honest here, if you dropped 100 grand on a game in the 90s, you were already making a very expensive game. Today's AAA titles swallow 10s of millions. Easily. But at the same time that the price tag jumped two magnitudes, so did the sales. While gaming was a geek's pastime in the 90s, and half a million copies sold meant that you were a celebrated like some sort of gaming messiah, today those AAA titles have to sell millions of copies to even be considered a success. But they sell that.
And as we know, games have insane fixed and very low per-unit cost, so more sales almost directly mean more revenue. Especially now that digital distribution is a thing and you don't even have to create boxed copies anymore. Selling a game for 60 bucks means like 59 bucks additional profit.
With this, the game industry was able to stick to that price tag for as long as it did. The problem now is that the market is saturated, sales don't jump by magnitudes anymore, but the cost of making games keeps creeping upwards. And people are used to paying 60 bucks for their games. Ask for 70 and they'll recoil in disgust and tell you to stuff your overpriced crap where the sun doesn't shine.
The industry's answer was a price hike through the back door, with mandatory 0-day DLC, loot boxes and other must-have addons that eventually moved that price tag for a AAA game closer to 100 bucks, which is probably also what you'd have to ask if you were honest about what you'd need to demand to make a profit reliably.
Because, and that leads to the next part of this problem, making a AAA game becomes more and more a gamble. You're risking your company, your career, your everything. If there's like 50 millions at stake, you can't really take any risks. That game has to sell. There is no room for fuckups. Or experiments. You can't just greenlight a game that sounds great on paper. How many concepts sound great on paper only to turn out like total rubbish? So what do the big studios do? Well, play it safe, of course. Call of Battlefield: $subtitle $sequential_number and EA Sports game $year are the result. Franchises that provide a reliable income due to a reliable customer base who will buy the next incarnation of the game because they have to if they want to continue playing, since we're gonna turn the servers off as soon as the new iteration hits the market.
Yes, this is circling the drain slowly because rehashing and regurgitating old content is maybe interesting to a player base that is used to something like that but it isn't exactly something that will attract new players. Such franchises tend to be exclusionary. Coming in as the new guy is not easy in such communities, especially if a certain level of competitiveness and "elitism" starts to spread among those "in the know". So every time people stop buying the next installation because they are no longer interested in the game, fewer people effectively buy and play the game, which in turn has its own effect because these games depend on a large player base. Nobody to play with, why buy the game?
Is that problem solvable? Yes. Well, no. Well, it depends. First, it will depend on whether people are going to accept that they are going to pay about 100 bucks for a AAA game one way or another, either by simply paying 100 bucks for it or by being bullshitted into doing it with 0-day DLCs and mandatory addons, "game passes", "season passes" and whatever else is used to somehow push the actual price tag to the point where the game is actually turning a profit. Personally, I'd feel insulted to be led on and fooled like this, but it seems to work, at least for now, in the game industry. It will probably continue to
Most Don't Pay To Play (Score:2)
There aren't a lot of new games to play (Score:2)
There really haven't been a lot of new AAA game releases recently. It seems that the entire gaming industry got delayed by 18 months because of COVID, and the games that were supposed to release in late 2021/2022 are now all delayed until 2023.
EverQuest... (Score:2)
...was a big deal in online gaming back in 1999, I remember when we all collectively freaked out when they hit 100,000 subscribers, it was absolutely unheard of at the time. I think it hit ~300k after its first year. Times change, 100,000 is probably an epic failure these days.
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100,000 subscribers in a MMO is an epic failure.
MMOs are insane gambles. Everyone looks at WoW and wants a piece of that cake, without realizing that this cake has not only been split up but eaten. You can get a few crumbs from that plate, but the cake is firmly in the hands of the ones that have it.
MMO players are not something you can easily dislodge. They don't come to you because you have a new MMO to offer. This isn't like any other game where people play, get weary eventually and want something new. T
- the game of life is best - (Score:3)
Pong was my first. It wouldn't run on my Fortran machine, but when I got my Apple ][ computer, it was fantastic. Then there was Asteroids, vastly more sophisticated and I enjoyed it, but somehow not as revolutionary. A few more 'skill' based games followed but each slightly less impressive (skill here refers not to any useful skill like throwing a ball or beating up a karate expert). Then followed a long string of text based games, often social- if you don't mind social misfits. And then board games that run on an 8bit computer; bored, but I discovered mahjong which is still interesting. I got a little thrill with PacMan.
Jumping ahead to subscription, multiplayer games- I realized it was a scam from the start. I'm not spending money to play stupid games with strangers. Shootemups in general got tiresome really quick. There is hope; I like the idea of Grand Theft Auto, but unwilling to pay for the subscription to play with strangers. These latest games came with the internet, and later the web, and Wikipedia, etc. For the first time in history, everyone has access to all the world's knowledge. Gamers have no interest, of course. But inquiring minds opened up- no thinking person has time to waste on games when all that is out there waiting to be explored.
What I have learned since Pong it that life is the best game. It isn't in a computer. You can't subscribe. It isn't proprietary, patented or copyrighted. Conway's Game of Life is OK, but real life is better. Live your life the best you can, it's the only one you will get. You won't find it in a digital device.
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Life has kick-ass graphics, but the gameplay sucks.
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And am afraid I disagree with a lot of what you wrote. I agree with a fair amount (I haven't really enjoyed a shoot 'em up since original Doom, and stopped at Quake although I suppose you could include TimeSplitters in there) but that's just personal preference. Your "I saw it as a scam from the start"...that's also just personal preference. I play Elder Scrolls Online, I play with 'strangers' (guild members I only met thro