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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?
Radical idea. Puberty hits. Older kids get interested in girls. Making friends. Socializing.
I'd post more, but I don't want to frighten off Slashdot's majority population.
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I'm not suprised because I've never really seem the appeal of hard-core gaming. Sure, a game can be a nice distraction once in a while, just as a movie can. But in the long run, stimulating activities (books, athletics, social interactions, programming) are always more interesting.
Between the cost of gaming these days (prohibitive on the PC unless you have a new computer, outragious on the systems) and the sheer lack of anything decent new or inovating unless its by Nintendo out there. The writing was on the wall for another Video Game Crash.
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Also, I also like to believe that games were more fun and creative. When was the last time you played a game like Quest for Glory? How about Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure? I'm sure there are still creative games being made today, but it gets difficult to find the gems among the rest of what's being produced (I liked Katamari Damacy ;).
No, not growing up. Sure, the current generation of gaming teens will grow up - but then there'll be a new generation who are starting gaming. That said, the article only looks at the former, so I'd have to conclude that it jumps to conclusions about overall teen gaming numbers. I'd say that I'll try to reduce the time that I spend gaming, because of other commitments - but I know that I won't.
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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Of course people said they were "intending" to play less.
Smokers usually "intend" to quit too.
Saying it isn't doing it.
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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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We're just a generation of video gamers that's older now. Gen X-Y played/plays video games... This new generation doesn't. It used to be that target markets were 12-20, now we're older and its changed along side us to 18-30.
Sound familiar? It's the same thing we constantly take the piss out of Hollywood for every time movies come up. At the forefront of this are the likes of Bethesda and Bungie - flashy graphics, sequels and series, micropurchases, and universally unsatisfactory gameplay saved only by a few major strengths.
I have a 9 year old (I know he's not a teenager) that would easily rather play Yugi-Oh or Vs than just about any game out there. I have been carting him to tournaments and events for the last six months or so to see crowds swelling from about 10 or 15 to 50 or 60 players. Not just kids either. By far the largest groups are 15-20 year olds, and not your stereotypical D&D or other tabletop type players either. The GenCon Yugi Oh event last year pulled in a few hundred players, and in Vs., you can win some big money playing the Pro Circuit.
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I'm going to take a stab at this and say its the same reason I find myself playing less (or one of the two main reasons). There's just not much new out there I want to play. I haven't been excited by a game release since GTA:SA, and even that was muted since I knew it was more of the same. I have no plans to by a 360 or a PS3 (I own both companies current gen systems), because I don't see any reason to own them. It looks like more of the same, but with better graphics. The only system that I'm even paying any attention to is the Revolution, just because it seems to be the only one that has any potential for "new" games. Heck, I just installed Baldur's Gate II on my PC to play (never played it before) since there was nothing out there that I wanted to spend $40-60 on. I think this is a real problem for the industry. There's nothing truely new on the horizon, and there's a HUGE back-catalog of games for much less to choose from, that besides graphics, offer essentially the same gameplay and what's coming out.
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.
Now with $500+ consoles, $60-$80 games, and monthly subscription fees that exceed what I used to spend on gas in a month -
Adult gamers are the cash cow of the gaming industry - teens are a secondary market.
This is news, how?
The original gamer-generation (NES and the like) can finally get back to quality-gaming with intelligent people instead of listening to 12-year-olds whining to their mum on teamspeak.
"Back when I used to play games, the clone didn't exist..."
Bullshit. What wasn't a clone in the 70's and 80's? If it wasn't Pong clones, it was Space Invaders clones, then Pac-Man clones...
"Studies have shown that the average age of a gamer has gone up to the mid 30's."
Well, I'm a gamer right in the middle of the 30's, and I also find myself less attracted to games lately. So while this is just one guy, so not a statistic or analysis or anything, I'll still go ahead and post my impressions. Namely that it isn't "broadening", it isn't waiting for the next console, it's just interest seems to fade at my end of the market too:
A) less and less games are any good.
- Sequels, f-ing sequels. And verbatim clones of other games. That's been the story of the whole decade. I was for example one of the first to get fanatical about RTS back in the 90's, and... also among the first to get burned out and hate the whole genre, as every single bloody RTS was a verbatim clone of Dune 2. I find I'm getting fed up with other genres too, lately, for much the same reasons. FPS for example is another genre I'm not touching with a 10 ft pole any more.
- Games are getting shorter. Maybe playing 80 hours a week is bad, but getting 70-80 hours out of a game (spread over a few weeks) was actually getting good value for my money.
Games one can finish in 10 hours used to be considered too short even a couple of years ago (read some reviews of the first Max Payne or VTMR), while now they're the norm and going downhill fast. In another couple of years we'll probably look forward to games one can finish in 5 hours. Sorry, that's just not good value for my money. (And would be even less so for a teen on an allowance.)
And then there were the masterpieces, games like Fallout 2 or Arena, to quote just two, where I've spent hundreds of hours on each, just because they offered that many different possibilities. E.g., playing a diplomat in Fallout 2 was a _very_ different experience from playing a gunslinger, and that in turn was entirely different from playing a stealthy thief/assassin. There was a damn good reason to replay, because it actually opened new avenues to explore. Whereas for the 10 hour games of nowadays, once you've finished it, that's that.
- Games are getting less diverse. Everything is not just yet another RTS, FPS or action-adventure, it's the _same_ RTS, FPS or action-adventure I've played before. In the early 90's there were more than a dozen different genres, and countless variations and quirks inside each genre. Nowadays everything converges towards the same freakin' game that sold well last year. For example both RPG and platformers have already converged into the same "action-RPG" genre, as far as the western publishers are concerned. Not only the sub-genres of each (e.g., turn based vs real time, or team-based vs single-character) have disappeared, but the whole goddamn genres disappeared.
This lack of variety makes for a very boring experience. It used to be that each game I played was _different_ and thus interesting. There were new things to explore and discover, and new sets of tools to solve a problem with. Now it's like I'm playing the same game over and over again, and at some point it just gets boring. It also doesn' help that:
- Games are getting "dumbed down", so to speak. And don't give me the line that it's to make them accessible to casual gamers and female gamers, because that's not it. A simple intuitive interface is what casual gamers need, but what I'm talking about here is lack of content, which is an entirely different thing and won't make a casual gamer happier either. He'll get bored just as well.
A good game should be like chess: a simple interface and simple rules, but lots of ways to combine them. What we see today in the game market is the exact opposite: what went down is the number of things you can do with them. A lot of the complexity and alternate ingenious ways to solve a problem just disappeared, and you're left with a game on rails that doesn't even require any thinking.
E.g., the ingenious puzzles of the 80's and early 90's have been replaced by FPS "jump puzzles" that require exactly zero thinking, a
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Seriously, more people need to remind these kids that Jesus made cops out of meat for a reason. Sheesh. -PD
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