New study confirms what your backlog already knew about $70 games
A new study about gamers and their hobby habits shows quite a divide between Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z, but there's one big common denominator.
In an IGN Entertainment poll of "thousands of highly-committed content consumers in the US, UK and Australia," 62 percent said that they no longer buy full-price games. Whether this means purchasing games at lower prices or waiting for "premium" games to go on sale is unclear, but it reflects a big change in the industry.
"Working with Kantar and at UC Berkeley, we identified people to ask the questions to," said Karl Stewart, SVP of IGNE Global Marketing, according to GamesIndustry.biz. "They were highly qualified entertainment cinephiles, gamers consuming a lot of stuff weekly… we're not talking about casual here. We're talking about people who basically say: I only have so many hours in the week, and this is still where I choose to spend my disposable time."
Gamers veering away from purchasing most full-price games checks out against info that is revealed monthly via studies by analysts like Circana: the top-played games each month are usually free-to-play titles like Fortnite and Roblox, with yearly titles like Call of Duty and sports games such as NBA 2K26 sprinkled in.
The study also revealed interesting age-based info, like millennials (38 percent) and Gen Z (42 percent) are more likely to buy games at full price, while only 20 percent of Gen X (older games born between 1965 and 1980) say they do the same. Gen X also prefers singleplayer games, while Gen Z prefers multiplayer, and Millennials are "almost evenly split."
From my perspective, there are just too many games to play at any given time, and a lot of them are free while prices remain high for many paid ones. I love a good premium-priced triple-A experience as much as anyone, but I (as a Millennial) certainly don't purchase as many games as I used to either.
Do you pick up video games at full price ($69.99), wait for price drops, or only deal in Steam sales? Let us know in the comments.
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