I do buy games from time to time, but 2 of my most played games on Steam are just free games. OpenTTD and vivid/stasis.

Why buy new when I have a backlog, the PS1/2 catalog emulated, and can wait 6+ months for a sale

Then who is? Millions of people are gonna buy the new Call of Duty on release. Who are they?

I keep buying games on sale but I'm just not playing much of my backlog.

I keep going back to a few strategy games and putting even more hours in. The vast majority of my gaming in the past 2 years has been between 3 games.

Ultimate Admiral Dreadnought - Janky, and I have problems with how HE shells are handled in the main mod I play, keep booting it up. 850 hours played.

Star Wars Empire At War. So many amazing mods.

Wartales - game gets stale after a while but it's good enough that after a bit I go back to it to put even more hours in.

I have so many amazing games that when I do play them I love them, but I keep going back to these strategy games. Oh, and a bunch of time on Need For Speed Heat.

I've been spending a bunch on other games, but I'm just not playing them.

even milleneals arnt paying it, like myself. not paying for things like switch, or swsh, because they decided to enshittify the console or games, and gouge prices.

people are cutting back on purchases period.

has little to do with culture, quality of games, etc. A lot more to do with the fact that inflation has gone fucking insane.

As a old member of Gen Z, i can definitely say the prices aren't helping. A lot of people in my age group just don't work from what i've seen, so with 70$ and sometime 80$ games they aren't going to be buying many. On top of that, and this may just be the people i've exposed myself too, but most of them don't want longer experiences. They'd rather plop down with something like FF14 or Mario Kart and play that over and over and over again. That's not a bad thing, but i definitely think it's not helping. And like i said, this might just be the people i expose myself too.

I sometimes forget GenZ are now adults. Some now do porn.

The economy is terrible with both hardware and software becoming more expensive, theres a good selection of free and long-lifetime games (be it live-service or just very long and replayable), and a lot of the newer paid games have become worse.

I'd be significantly more suprised if this wasn't the case.

The seven seas are way more friendly

Its not that we cant afford them necessarily, its that we cant justify them. The main reason you needed to get the new game was because all your friends were getting it. Only nerds and dweebs and losers play single player games. CoD is where its at bro. When everyone moves to the new game you can lose social time with friends or you can spend another £50. Now that everyone is poor, enough people aren't migrating to the newest shiniest edition immediately and people are playing games they already have.

Couple that with desperately working every opportunity you can every hour and adults just don't game together any more.

Tl;dr they are not feeling the social pressure to buy any more.

Aren't we all, fam?

https://lemmy.world/c/foss_gaming

oh they are talking about AAA and AAAA games, so then they are not buying/playing fewer games but moved to the indie scene.

Buy Indies. Fuck AAA

Just to add a contrasting perspective I feel like it's been an absolute golden age of gaming for me lately personally:

No Man's Sky still getting relatively fun updates. Cyberpunk 2077 was great on launch and arguably much better now.

The Last Of Us Part 2 on PC is incredible and I'm happy that the port exists so I could experience it. You haven't really played the game till you replay it with both protagonists wearing their Hotline Miami shirts in all the cutscenes. PS4 Spider-Man on PC was prolly the best superhero game I've played.

MSFS2020 opened a whole new world of flight sims to me, especially when it comes to doing fun VOR2VOR navigation with littlenavmap charts printed to PDFs and attached in VR, and Assetto Corsa did the same for racing sims.

Speaking of VR, H3VR is stronger than ever. I have many fond memories of VRChat just a few years back.

Victoria 3 has a really fun thriving modding scene. Indie games like Sea Power, Flight of Nova, Stray, Ultrakill, World of Horror, Nuclear Option, Descenders and Crisis In The Kremlin: The Cold War have been a big timesink for me lately as well as classics of indie like Suzerain and actual art masterpiece DEFCON.

It's also been great to go back and play old classics and PS3 emulation now that PC hardware is much cheaper after the crypto/scalper crises circa 2018.

Also, with Steam play and the steam deck, PC Gaming is easier than ever and just hassle-free.

I never played the popular junk so ig to me all this gacha mtx horse armor crap just doesn't really relate.

I hope they make it abnormal to own a $3000 gaming pc in middleschool again.

Unsurprisingly. Games have gotten way more expensive and a lot more soulless. Gems like BG3 are a rarity. The recently released "enhanced" edition of Neverwinter Nights 2 is an awful cashgrab and an disappointment after the successful enhanced edition of the first one so I'm just playing through the original release with an unofficial patch again...The only game I'm looking forward to this year is the new Anno and given that Ubisoft has its fingers in it I'm still wary about that one.