there are also almost no new games worth even looking at anymore. There are some, but they are quite rare

Could it be that the economy fucking sucks?

Nope, clearly it's our fault for not just going out and buying stuff.

Yeah. People have no money. Ask one of the billionaires to prop up this failing industry.

Edit: /s

Its not that we cant afford them necessarily, its that we cant justify them. The main reason you needed to get the new game was because all your friends were getting it. Only nerds and dweebs and losers play single player games. CoD is where its at bro. When everyone moves to the new game you can lose social time with friends or you can spend another £50. Now that everyone is poor, enough people aren't migrating to the newest shiniest edition immediately and people are playing games they already have.

Couple that with desperately working every opportunity you can every hour and adults just don't game together any more.

Tl;dr they are not feeling the social pressure to buy any more.

I think SOME of it has to do with AAA being dogshit, but I think a lot of it is actually that they just play roblox. I have been told "why would I buy peak when roblox has this mountain climbing game for free?"

I hope they make it abnormal to own a $3000 gaming pc in middleschool again.

I sometimes forget GenZ are now adults. Some now do porn.

Buy Indies. Fuck AAA

Did industry try to raise prices even more? Maybe higher prices is what's missing for gaming industry to blossom /s

people are cutting back on purchases period.

has little to do with culture, quality of games, etc. A lot more to do with the fact that inflation has gone fucking insane.

Live service on console was obvious on the way for every genre back on the 360/PS3 era with FIFA ultimate team and publishers also having that period of time when they were trying to kill used games with that single account multiplayer access code

Then it became super obvious because of PC from the super success of TF2 hats and eventually CSGO skins by like 2015. Trying to compete with WoW was an ocean of dead video game studios. Fortnite perfected live service on consoles and CoD adapted and went just as wild with it

Single player games, my hot take is Mass Effect, Uncharted, and Assassin's Creed killed AAA single player narrative games by succeeding so well to making future games mediocre. Mass Effect had interesting alien species dynamics but never took them with much of any depth. They were Star Wars movies rather than the wild Star Wars EU. Uncharted was a hyper popular Hollywood blockbuster where the emotional highlight being the beginning of Uncharted 4 with Nate and Elena being a cute couple.

Assassin's Creed stories kept going deeper and deeper into name dropping famous figures/mythology that it became parody. Historical clout chasing wrapped together in a nonsense overarching plot that should have had some satisfying ending back in 2012 but instead is effectively spin-offs the series

So Mass Effect hints at interesting politics but plays things safe and gives you none but Hollywood space opera in video games with solid animations and facial animations were fresh in the 360 era. Uncharted was even more extreme in that regards than Mass Effect where there was still novelty in Hollywood mimicry with even better graphics and even more scripted for explosive set pieces. Assassin's Creed and eventually Far Cry and Watch Dogs are bottom feeders. Chase trends, name drop - shotgun approach for trailer fodder. They are sadly the standards of AAA single player narrative

Also live service single player games are competitive. Stories are just as shallow but frequent in release and graphics at a level good enough now. Talking like Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Wuthering Waves