Millennials Spend More Time Playing Video Games Than Gen Z and Teens, New Study Finds (variety.com) 69
Millennials are the largest untapped market that video game companies should be focusing on, per a new study from Fandom, which finds that the generation spends more time gaming than both Gen Z and teens. Variety reports: According to fan-community platform and entertainment company Fandom's annual Inside Gaming report, which was released Thursday, "despite teens and Gen Z spending more time gaming than they did last year, older generations of players are spending more hours per week gaming." Compiled based on proprietary user data from Fandom.com and a global study that examines how gamer motivations and behaviors vary by generation, the report found that 52% of Millennials surveyed rank playing video games as their top interest and 40% of Fandom's Millennial audience spends over 22 hours per week gaming, compared to only 29% of tweens.
Additionally, Fandom's report found that "influence to purchase brands that have investments in the gaming space gets stronger with age," as Fandom's millennial users are at least 24% more likely to be "heavily influenced" to buy games compared to the average Fandom user. But that doesn't mean studios and developers should start sleeping on the younger generations: While 45% of gamers overall are spending more time gaming than they did a year ago, and Millennials are the demo playing the most of anyone, the biggest growth in overall time spent gaming vs. last year was seen among tweens and teens, up 63% and 48%, respectively.
Additionally, Fandom's report found that "influence to purchase brands that have investments in the gaming space gets stronger with age," as Fandom's millennial users are at least 24% more likely to be "heavily influenced" to buy games compared to the average Fandom user. But that doesn't mean studios and developers should start sleeping on the younger generations: While 45% of gamers overall are spending more time gaming than they did a year ago, and Millennials are the demo playing the most of anyone, the biggest growth in overall time spent gaming vs. last year was seen among tweens and teens, up 63% and 48%, respectively.
Re: (Score:3)
Lazy troll is lazy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Ah, there's a perfect meme for this (Score:2)
Can confirm (Score:5, Funny)
I can confirm this. As a millenial I've played a lot of video games, but I've never played Gen Z nor Teens.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Kidding, kidding. Matt Gaetz has played plenty of teens.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You are too young to remember Z
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Can confirm (Score:1)
Re:Screentime (Score:5, Insightful)
Like I'm 40 now and still into computer games. Though instead of playing for entertainment I'm developing for money, intellectual curiosity, and entertainment.
A lot of others just remain to be consumers of this kind of media, which goes beyond what you seem to be thinking of being "toys for children". Think of it as being analogous to watching movies, series, listening to music, reading books. Generally not considered to be a phase but a kind of entertainment media.
Over the last couple of decades, with improvements to hardware, and video games having become a huge and profitable industry, video game development has adopted a lot from those other fields of media where a lot of money is put into the story writing and acting, which in many cases turns them into what could be considered interactive movies.
Re: (Score:3)
> video games having become a huge and profitable industry,
Indeed. The gaming industry is bigger [gamerhub.co.uk] then the Music and Movie business combined. Back in 2020 the industries were valued at:
* Gaming: $159 Billion
* Movies: $41 Billion
* Music: $19 Billion
If we exclude desktop and console then mobile accounts for roughly half at $86 Billion.
Obviously the pandemic definitely helped gaming more then movies but pre-pandemic [marketwatch.com] even the games industry was valued at $139 billion.
Who knew that "Play" was an universal ac
Re: (Score:2)
Computer games in general are a phase
git gud lol
Re: (Score:2)
Computer games in general are a phase
They are clearly not. The difference in the study aren't that great. The real take home message here is that 29% of tweens still find time to play *OVER 3 HOURS A DAY* among their studies, and somewhat curated commitments.
I am a millennial. I have a fuckton more spare time now than I did as a tween, especially due to a lack of kids. Time spent gaming.
Re: (Score:2)
A more interesting statistic could be any screen time in general. Either casual glance at a device or a whole shift. Computer games in general are a phase, but isn't it all ClockTok now?
Gen Z is still on their screen more than Millennials, but it seems they have different interests than extreme gaming (extreme meaning 22+ hours per week in this case). My guess is they spend more time on Tik Tok and other social media apps instead of playing games.
I also wonder if there is a sample bias. My guess is Fandom has a higher portion of the teenagers and early 20's market in their userbase than they do people in their 30's. Which could simply mean that people in their 30's who are users of Fandom
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I have a 'classic car' for which somewhat regular value adjustments are required. Many in the owners club would say ever 5k miles or so.. I have done it myself because working on that car is a hobby. I have other vehicles I can drive, if that one isn't in a ready to use condition. - Its leaser activity.
I am sure many of us have more leaser time than we did in 1950, thanks to all the labor saving things we have like value lifters with rollers or self adjusting hydraulics rather than a softer metal sacrific
Re: Dumb and Dumber (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Dumb and Dumber (Score:4, Insightful)
These days cars have warnings not to drink from the battery, and promises that holding the steeering wheel and paying attention, may soon be optional.
You are reeeaaallly stretching things to make the point you seem to want to make here.
Kids have always had fun things competing for their scholastic time. Video games aren't somehow more evil than going out and partying.
Maybe also take a moment to consider the obscene youth violence rates we had before video gaming got big https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com] .
Re: Dumb and Dumber (Score:2, Interesting)
It's arguable that millenials play games more simply because there was less competing for their attention. Likewise even more arguable that there hasn't always been so much competing for their attention.
I also don't think their point was games are evil but that their can be loyalty to a given hobby.
Ultimately though you just need to be called our for saying their has always been things competing for our interest as we grew up. It's simply not true, if born in the 80s you saw the first gaming concepts but st
Re: (Score:3)
For starters, you don't seem to understand what's being discussed. The Slashdot post is about how kids are playing less video games than adults, millennials are all grown ass adults working jobs to put roofs over their heads at this point so the youth IQ drop doesn't apply here.
Ultimately though you just need to be called our for saying their has always been things competing for our interest as we grew up. It's simply not true, if born in the 80s you saw the first gaming concepts but still probably played with GI Joe and watched a few TV shows, as most of it was junk.
Ha! "Called out" What a brave hero you are.
Before video games it was absolutely TV that was poluting the youth's minds and robbing them of their initiative and before that it was reading for fun. This is nothing more than grumpy ol'
Re: (Score:2)
There's another point in this thread
I have 2 kids 17 and 13.. Watching them grow up I was always puzzled watching them watch PewDiePie play minecraft, when they had a PC with minecraft. Neither one of them has ever really played with lego's. There's other experiences
Re: (Score:2)
I have 2 kids 17 and 13.. Watching them grow up I was always puzzled watching them watch PewDiePie play minecraft, when they had a PC with minecraft. Neither one of them has ever really played with lego's. There's other experiences they just don't have that we did. Like putting together a model car, or getting an Atari with Atari Basic and a manual on how to write a short program or two. Growing up I feel like there was more emphasis on how things worked, or fit together with childrens toys than there is today.
Meanwhile my 23 year old nephew who just finished college and is now an engineer did all of the things as a child that you mention. Are you sure you arent normalizing a nerdy childhood? I'm in my mid 40's and while I remember kids of similiar interests also playing with Legos and whatnot I also remember that quite a lot did not.
In fact, if we're using Legos as some sort of metric as we seem to be doing their sales have certainly been doing well this last decade https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com] which pretty
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure I'm not. Let's take computers out of this for a second and look at what kids were playing with prior (and pulling all of this from my old brain)
A lot of kids played with nature. The creeks. I know I did personally, and that was one of those themes in Stephen King's "IT" was the kids played in the creek. They built a dam that was so good the water company came out. Granted a good portion of my childhood was spent nerding out, but an equ
Re: (Score:2)
Well now you're not even supporting what you said before and are making a completely different case so while what you're saying here is certainly true https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com] it doesnt seem to have much bearing on what I've been saying.
Re: (Score:2)
Not my fault you're unable to draw the parallelism's between my points, that is your shortcoming, not mine. It doesn't matter if it's "Nerding out" as you put it, or building a dam, or seeing tadpoles grow into frogs. There's a certain level of intellect that develops in a child when they can take things apart, and understand how individual components work towards the whole.
Attention seeking on TikTok or living vicariously through others is not equal
Re: (Score:2)
Not my fault you're unable to draw the parallelism's between my points, that is your shortcoming, not mine.
And it's not my fault you're both rude and the type to change the topic when you realize you dont have anything to contribute to the current.
Glad we got that out of the way.
Re: (Score:2)
Sick burn bro!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Dumb and Dumber (Score:2)
Some fair points. Some subcultures like board gaming might be growing but likewise we both wonder how prevalent and clearly this poll doesn't dog into that.
Re: (Score:2)
These days cars have warnings not to drink from the battery
And who exactly drank the battery acid in the first place to justify putting the warning there?
Obviously (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed - the golden area of video games as I look back was probably the late 80s thru the late 90s. Like maybe 85-2000.
Long after the death of the coin op arcade, and before everything had to be online, but there were still MUDs and early MMORPGs (UO) etc if you were into that sort of thing. Other games could be played online and LAN games could be as well with stuff like Kali or ifrag.
I think when you consider inflation and the cost of the 'gaming' pc back then gaming has always been expensive. The cost
Re: (Score:3)
With games on the last few generations of consoles being cloud only or server only, a game that was something of someone's childhood will never be accessible, just like how movies were in the 1950s/1960s where when they were done in the theaters, that was it. There was no seeing it, period. This is how video games made in the past decade are. At best, we might have a YouTube playthrough or two, but the actual gameplay is forever gone.
Then add to the fact that gaming has been a trainwreck for the most par
Re: (Score:2)
I've started playing computer games in the 1980s yet would definitely prefer to play games from the 2010s. Skyrim, Prey, Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, Far Cry 4, Dishonored 1 and 2, Battletech, XCOM (ok, that one is a remake of a 1990s game, but is more fun to play than the clunky original game), Alien: Isolation, Fallout: New Vegas, SOMA... all of them great games from the 2010s. All
despite the in game purchase hell. The only games from the 1980s I would play today would be Boulder Dash and
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We had the greatest era guys - let us be thankful for that - an era we can continue to enjoy from this "futurestate".
Even more so, since we belonged to a generation where games would work without an Internet connection, which means we can still play those 10 to 20-year-old games just fine today. I feel real bad for the current generation, as they have no idea how much stuff will just disappear forever in a few years.
Untapped? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Millennials are the largest *untapped* market that video game companies should be focusing on...the generation spends more time gaming than both Gen Z and teens
That word does not mean what you think it means
Strange results (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Strange results (Score:1)
There is a difference between paying a lot for a game and playing a game a lot.
Talk to a real diehard gaming and they can probably name one game they played to death, chalking up 1000 hours all for transactions were added. In fact if we looked at per capita gaming hours for CS1.6 vs CS:GO we likely would be surprised the average play time for the earlier game is higher but it's indisputable more money has been made by the latter title.
There are lots of reasons for this just like how most MMOs today are shit
Re: (Score:3)
Or maybe the survey put quite an unreasonable bar in place. 22hours of anything other than working or sleep is a LOT in one week. That's over 3 hours a day.
A more relevant headline is 29% of tweens are failing school and university. When I was in that age bracket between study and work I didn't have time to play games. Now as a millennial I clock off for work and do whatever the heck I feel like.
Depends on whether OnlyFans counts as a game (Score:2)
strange relationship (Score:1)
They were got video games before social media (Score:2)
Millennials were playing video games before the real surge in social media.
Gen Z and teens have had social media for most of their lives (and many would have had a phone before getting a traditional gaming device).
because millennials are growing up (Score:3)
...and starting to recognize that everything they 'enthused' so very much about for the past dozen-plus years is basically the result of political or commercial manipulation on a vast scale and that the entire system and culture is so colossally fucked, it's just better to quit giving a shit and play video games instead.
I mean, https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Gen-X says "come sit down on the nihilism bench by us and watch it burn."
Congratulations Sr. Gramsci, you guys are winning.
Gaming related activites? (Score:2)
The article came across as more of a marketing blurb than a serious analysis, so I didn't make it very far, but I'm really curious about what this actually means. For example, if Zoomers are watching game streams, instead of playing games, does that mean that they're playing less? On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, they're still just as engaged with video games as the older generation. But I do think that Gen Z has a greater affinity for social media than Millennials and something needs to be d
What's going on? (Score:2)
Well, if they aren't playing video games, learning musical instruments, or even fucking as much, what exactly are they doing? I hope it's productive, whatever it is.
how to market to millens (Score:1)
Not surprised (Score:2)
I'm not surprised. My own kids, now all in their early twenties, were far more interesting in watching streams or youtube videos of other people playing games, than in playing them themselves.
I expect younger kids are too busy watching the toktiks and doing dances or whatever.