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Teens Losing Interest In Gaming?
Survey firm Piper Jaffrey has results saying that teenagers are losing interest in videogaming. From the Gamasutra article: "Interestingly, almost 80 percent of teens indicated that they intend to spend less time playing video games in 2006 and nearly 70 percent indicated that their interest in playing video games is decreasing." What do you think could be causing this drop in interest from young people? Sequels? Mature themes? Sequels?
They are just growing up and have better things to do than sit in front a screen wasting time making pixels kill each other all day.
Perhaps they've discover this thing called "Real Life".
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Individuals grow up, but the age range of the teenagers asked remains the same.
I'm in college and there are simply a lot more things to do whether it be work or walking down the hallway to someone elses room. No longer to I get home from school like I did in 10th grade at 3:00 to an empty house and load up a game of counterstrike since thats where all of my friends are, now my friends are down the hall (and really, though people still play CS to this day, gamers are much more spread out than they were back then). Even still in high school I started playing less. Last year I certainly played less. There were definately games that I would devote my time to (such as HL2 when it came out) but there was much less compulsive multiplayer action. Frankly, by then my friends and I all could drive, I had a part-time job and a girlfriend who was closer and more readily available than the girlfriend I had through so much of my counterstrike time.
there will always be computer games, I played some WoW over the summer (and intend to play again this summer) and I still will hop into a CS:s server or something in college when I feel like some gaming (the HL2 expansion gets released the first day of my reading period before finals week, its probobly going to kill me) but other things certainly have priority over gaming.
Bottles.
I really think this is just the regular ebb and flow of the games industry. I have a hard time believing that people are becoming less interested in games, although the one thing that might contribute to it would be the increase in interactive media. Rather than play a game, people are browsing on YouTube, updating MySpace, etc.
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1. What are these teens doing instead of playing games? Socializing is definitely a good bet. Maybe they're spending more time online in non-gaming pursuits. Maybe they're seeing more movies (probably not, I'm sure there's astudy somewhere showing movie attendence continuing to plummet even among the coveted teenage audience). There are only 24 hours in a day, and unless they're sleeping more, if they've cut back on games that means something else is more interesting.
2. What do the numbers say for the same age? The question, as they've framed it, tells you a lot about trends over age, but not over time. It tells you how this year's 16-year-olds have changed since they were 15, but it says nothing about the habits of this year's 16-year-olds vs. last year's 16-year-olds.
You could easily have a situation in which every single person surveyed plays games less than the year before, but the influx of younger teens into the survey's range keeps the overall levels of game play the same.