Despite all the award-winning and important titles that have been released in recent years, it seems that gamers are still stuck on titles that were released before 2018. Specifically, we continue to play games as services. A new study confirms that the majority of time spent gaming in 2023 was spent on games more than six years old.
In its annual report of the video game industry corresponding to 2023the research company Newzoo determined that despite the growth of the market — which surpassed $90 billion in profits that year — gamers’ time and money is not reaching both new releases and old games as a service. .
They are titles like Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Rocket League, Apex Legends, Fall Guys, Valorant, Grand Theft Auto V, Counter-Strike 2 y Call of Duty: Warzone those who are taking the biggest slice of the business: 77% of the players’ time. Of the remaining 23%, the majority is dedicated to annualized consequences such as EA Sports FC 24 and only 8% were dedicated to really new games, such as Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom y Baldur’s Gate 3.
In the part dedicated to the number of active monthly users per console we can see incredible data in this regard.
As you can notice, Fortnite It remains the most played game regardless of platform. It is rare to find new games in the lists of the 10 most played titles of the year, especially if we exclude updates to old games like Counter-Strike 2. EA Sports FC 24 It is the only new game on the PlayStation list and Starfield It is the only one on Xbox.
The only platform that shows games from 2023 in the top 10 of the most played games of that year is Nintendo Switch. This one has The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom, Super Mario Bros. Wonder y Hogwarts Legacy in second, third and ninth place respectively.
There is a lot of talk in the gaming community that we have to “vote with our wallets” when it comes to showing the video game industry what we really want. But we continue to show that apparently what we want are ‘free-to-play’ games full of microtransactions and updated over many years.
