A newly released gaming industry report by market researcher Newzoo shows that while the PC and console market grew by 2.6 percent in 2023, overall gaming time declined as players spent more and more time on a smaller slate of older games such as fortnite And league of legends.
On April 2, Newzoo has released its second annual report on the gaming industryincluding a lot of data and information about what people were playing and spending money on during 2023. According to Newzoo data, the PC and console gaming market grew and reached $93.5 billion in revenue in 2023. This may seem like good news, but digging Looking at the data, it becomes clear that this is only good news for a small number of publishers and developers.
Newzoo’s data shows that the top 10 games on each platform (ranked by average number of monthly active users, or MAU) are full of older, established titles. fortnite It took the crown on all platforms, including Switch and PC. The rest of the lists included titles that will not surprise you, such as Grand Theft Auto V, Counter-Strike 2, Roblox, Minecraft, Rocket League, Apex Legends, valor guys, And Call of duty. Across Xbox and Playstation consoles, only one single-player game made the top ten: Starfield.
Proving that gamers are primarily focusing on older games, Newzoo data shows that just 66 titles accounted for 80 percent of total play time in 2023. 60 percent of that play time was spent on games that are six years or older. In fact, in 2023, there are five retro games —Fortnite, Roblox, League of Legends, Minecraft, And GTA 5 —It represents 27% of the total playing time in the year.
Things get worse. Of the 23 percent of playtime spent in 2023 on new games — defined as two years or less — more than half was spent on annual installments as large as the latest Madden Or an NBA game. Only 8 percent of video game playing time was spent on non-annual new titles e.g Diablo IV or Baldur’s Gate III.
While the Newzoo report suggests that you can still succeed in this environment, the reality is that gamers are spending less and less time on new games and spending more and more time on already established franchises and live service titles, making it more difficult for publishers and developers to find an audience. . This is because unlike previous decades, you’re not just competing with whatever hot new game is on the shelves, but instead battling giants like fortnite And Robloxcompletely free games that contain endless amounts of content created by their users.
“Growing the game’s player base will be increasingly challenging, especially in our current landscape, where evergreen titles and strong content pipelines prevail,” Newzoo said in the report. In other words, good luck if you’re not making a big sequel, remake, or annual spin-off of some popular series.
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