AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor comments on Video games spending by young Americans is dropping sharply, report suggests

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?

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[–] AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@sh.itjust.works 62 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 1 point 1 year ago

And even today's potato PCs can run old AAA titles just fine.

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[–] TachyonTele@piefed.social 21 points 1 year ago (1 child)

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.

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[–] Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago

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.

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[–] julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

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?

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[–] grte@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago

Especially when most games that've come out this year run like shit, and a new graphics card is nearly a rent payment

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[–] clif@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] ghosthacked@lemmy.wtf 4 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] ceenote@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Studies conducted at my desk and on my couch have also found a downward trend in video game quality.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

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!)

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[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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?

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 1 year ago* (3 children)

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.

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[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

£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.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

£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.

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[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

Oh my house was way below the median, in my region of the country the median house price was £385k when I bought. If anything bungalows are often seen as a retirement option as well because no stairs to climb. At the same price range we could have got a terrace house, but they were in worse areas of town and the gardens much smaller. This is small (60m²) but its enough, after that I would like to have some outside space too. Which is also fairly small but its still something, the entire property is about 150m².

We need more places to apply similar taxes to discourage houses being left empty. It won't fix the problem but its a step in the right direction. Rentals being left empty for long periods of time is also a problem, for both residential and commercial property.

Still working remote, not sure how long I will be able to keep that but I have had to refuse orders to start commuting more than once. Compromise agreement is offered and everyone forgets about it while we continue not going into the office more than a handful of times a year. They moved the office over 50 miles away which I am using as my (quite reasonable!) justification to not go in on a regular basis. If it remained local I could cycle in more often quite happily. Yeah in my area there are not the best job opportunities, but there is at least work to be done if you want to just take any job and its not like the pay makes much difference. In the UK we have comparably good minimum wage. I am on £26k (~£13.33/h) and minimum wage gets you £12.21/hour. So even if I just switched to literally any job I wouldn't be taking much of a pay cut and its actually cheaper than taking the train each day would be as rail is really expensive here.

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[–] julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

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.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

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.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylrobinson/2025/04/02/why-no-one-is-hiring-you-and-its-not-your-resume/

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[–] julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

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.

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[–] julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Ah an economist, say no more fam.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 1 year ago* (3 children)

Hey there, sorry to necropost, but uh:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/july-s-jobs-report-included-big-downward-revisions-here-s-why-the-numbers-change/ar-AA1JJV2e

Remember how I was saying BLS jobs estimate data is bullshit, that keeps getting revised down?

Well they fucking blew the lid off of it this time, turns out that 258k jobs they initially said were added in May+June?

Poof, all gone, not real, we actually only added 33k, not 281k, in May + June, according to BLS.

And you know the measely 78k from July could also be revised downward too, in the coming months!

Trump actually fired the head of the BLS over this.

...

Sorry to get so irate over this whole issue and channel it all toward you, but jfc, I was right, 95% of finance bros and 'economists' most people hear from or about are actually fucking bad at their jobs.

See, technically, I am an econometrician, not economist.

It means I specialize in the metrics, the statistics, the data quality.

... it also means I am not surprised by things that other people get surprised by.

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[–] julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago

Although with the overt politicisation of BLS I think I'll be with you in trusting ADP more going forward. Going to be super interesting to watch any divergence from now on. I guess it could be that some of the YTD difference was some internal power struggle that was unwound by the revisions leading to Trump sticking his oar in, but I think that's a conspiracy theory until someone gives a quote to that effect.

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[–] julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Still confused why you continue to emphasise estimate when ADP is also an estimate.

I already emphasised the difficulty of real time stats, revisions are not shocking, but perfectly normal. I don't think anyone is that surprised (though we can agree that there are a lot of overconfident and less statistically literate professionals), the gulf between hard data and sentiment/alternative data (vibecession and so forth) was well covered and had to resolve one way or another.

ADP was +104k in July, so by your previous logic we should expect upwards revisions in the BLS July number as the year goes on right?

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 1 year ago*

Still confused why you continue to emphasise estimate when ADP is also an estimate.

Because BLS is a much shittier estimate.

revisions are not shocking, but perfectly normal.

Lol no, not to this degree, they absolutely are not, and its been getting worse for 2 years.

I don't think anyone is that surprised (though we can agree that there are a lot of overconfident and less statistically literate professionals)

Well the DJIA drop on the print, and every single news outlet's reaction indicates that a lof of people were surprised, but ok then.

Literally, expectations were +110k to +120k.

Which is pathetic and anemic even as an expectation, should be more like +220k for the economy to just be treading water basically, but nope, missed even that sad expectation by almost half.

ADP was +104k in July, so by your previous logic we should expect upwards revisions in the BLS July number as the year goes on right?

My... logic points to this?

I don't see how you draw that conclusion but ok.

Lets compare June ADP and BLS:

ADP: -28k / not revised because they don't need to.

BLS: +147k / revised down to +14k

ADP measures private payrolls, and then basically just statistically broadens their sample set to an estimated size of entire private economy by sectors and business sizes, for the same month.

BLS on the other hand does this for the entire economy, and has as fundamental parts of their modelling both an attempt to normalize for seasonality and also tries to figure in estimated population growth at the same time.

Meanwhile, the BLS counts of just pure private sector jobs that are almost exactly the same as what ADP counts... they are actually pretty close.

Post revision BLS has July at +83k private sector jobs. Thats not that far from ADP's +104k July private sector.

Roughly, to get the ADP number from BLS, for private sector, you just undo their seasonal normalization, then you're quite close to the ADP number most of the time.

BLS just royally fucked up everything not core private sector.

So no, I would not expect much of an upward revision in July BLS numbers, at best, they'll find they slightly undercounted private sector jobs, but overcounted a bunch of other categories, that would be my expectation.

...

BLS has a giant tome of complexity that goes into the totality of their big number print, with many, many factors that can be (and have been) wrong.

ADP's is less comprehensive over the whole economy, but is also much less complex and direct.

Less failure points = More reliable.

Its kinda like how in the past year or so, roughly 1/3 of the reported prices that actually make up the inflation number, CPI... well they are not actually reported prices.

They are model derived. Not actual reported data.

Lies, damned lies and statistics.

They more and more stats you pile onto something means you have more and more assumptions and reliance on models, the fact that BLS keeps having to revise shit means their models and assumptions are inadequate.

The BLS should probably be reporting error bars and ranges for their sector specific and the compounded error bars for their total metrics, I can tell you that the stuff they've been putting out would not make it through a peer reviewed academic journal as being statistically valid to any serious degree.

While I agree that Trump just firing the BLS head and likely replacing them with a stooge is even worse, the chuckleheads at BLS have been incompetent for a while, as has been everyone else who hasn't noticed this.

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[–] redsunrise@programming.dev 16 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] MangoPenguin@piefed.social 14 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

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