After an amazing year of AAA releases and other amazing games, the trends remain woefully the same.

Xbox Boss Phil Spencer said to Polygon back in March of this year “the thing that has me most concerned for the industry is the lack of growth.” It was a shocking statement at the time, but IGN found out in June of 2023, during the first day of the FTC v. Microsoft court case that Xbox had definitively “lost the console war.”  Spencer admitted as much to a podcast a month before the hearing, as the Playstation 5 continued to outsell the Xbox Series consoles at a nearly 2-to-1 ratio throughout last year. With the industry coming off of a huge boom due to the era of Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns which was only expected to grow combined with the titanic sales of games this year such as Dragonball Sparking Zero and the latest Call of Duty entry breaking records and causing Xbox Gamepass numbers to surge, his statement seemed even more confusing. 

The media landscape itself has seemingly transformed around the games that gamers love. Transmedia experiences such as the blockbuster success of The Super Mario Bros Movie and now the smash hit of Amazon’s Fallout are also pushing video games to the center of attention with a standard of quality that keeps fans new and old coming back. The casual gamer or fan of gaming may believe that the industry is stronger than ever at a glance with their favorite characters in the lights of Hollywood. This is especially true if you and yours decide to head to Super Nintendo World in Universal Studios in Hollywood or Japan and see the magic for yourselves.

However, a few recent studies have shone a light on player numbers across platforms, their gaming habits and the overall activity across the gaming landscape. These figures are certainly eye-opening and lend credence to Phil Spencer’s call to action to “grow the industry” and bet less on platform exclusive experiences, along with prioritizing the release of video games that feel “safer” in order to mitigate financial risk.

The Most-Played

According to the NewZoo 2024 PC & Console Gaming Report, “games ranking in the top 10 by average Monthly Active Users (MAUs) are over seven years old on average” in 2023, with Fortnite being the number 1 game across all platforms in this key metric. Other recognizable titles that hold chart-defining MAU numbers include Roblox, Minecraft and sequels or annualized franchise releases, such as the Call of Duty franchise or EA sports titles such as EA Sports FC 24. The notable outliers in these figures are the Nintendo Switch platform and Bethesda Game Studios’ release of Starfield, with the former holding the prestige of being the only new franchise to appear in these top 10 rankings.

Users’ choice in games on the Nintendo Switch platform is interesting and the most varied. Games such as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet versions rank highly on these charts, with Zelda bringing up the number 2 slot on the Nintendo handheld. These games, along with other Nintendo-published titles, make the Switch unique when compared to other platforms. In spite of this brand loyalty, Fortnite still manages to capture the number 1 spot in MAUs on the Nintendo machine.

When it comes to total playtime on these games, the report states that “the top five older titles accounted for over 25% of all playtime in 2023, making it tougher for new titles to compete.” The competition seems even more fierce when looking at another figure from the report, illustrating that “over 60% of playtime spent on new titles went to franchises with annual releases,” followed by a section that details the revenue that these games bring in. According to the report, “90% of new game revenue in 2023 was captured by 43 titles,” with Call of Duty at the top of the list with 14.3% of that pie. EA Sports FC 24 and NBA2K follow the military shooter with 10.8% and 10.4% respectively. 

In comparison, the report finds that “new titles competed for 8% of the total playtime in 2023” with “The top five titles within this smaller portion of new game playtime were Diablo IV, Hogwarts Legacy, Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, and Starfield. Collectively, these games accounted for 3.5% of last year’s (2023) total playtime.” The report also highlights this insight by stating “it’s worth noting that four of these titles are premium games, while only one of them is a live service.” A report from April of this year showed that even though titles such as Palworld, Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Tekken 8 sold well at the beginning of this year, only Helldivers 2 was able to make it past the finish line in the top 5 best sellers of 2024.

NewZoo’s latest report reinforced this, stating “Playtime has consolidated further, user acquisition costs are high, and conversion rates for new titles are low.” Call of Duty Black Ops 6 trails behind only EA Sports College Football 25 as the best-selling games of the year in the USA, with 2023’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 swinging above it’s weight with the likes of Helldivers 2 and Dragonball Sparking Zero in the top 5. These numbers prove that these franchise titles continue to command the vast majority of the industry’s revenue stream while ecosystems that thrive off of user-generated content such as Roblox captivate the younger generations. “Eighty percent of online consumers play games—that share is 94% for Gen Alpha and 86% for Gen Z. Younger generations also engage with games in more diverse ways, including viewing and creating game-related content.” While there is an evident interest towards premium single-player experiences in this data, let’s take a moment to look under the hood of these popular multiplayer games that capture the vast majority of gamers’ time and money.

The Game Industry Vs. Bots

According to the Imperva Bad Bot Report, bad bot traffic has risen by 1.8% in the last year to bring the overall traffic percentage to 32% across the Internet at large. When we zoom in on bad bot activity on a per-industry basis we discover that the game industry finds that 57.2% of all traffic comes from these malicious actors. This puts the industry firmly at the top of the list. To compare, Telecom and ISPs are noted to be the second most-affected industry of which 49.3% of all relevant traffic is found to be coming from bad bots.

This is an alarming statistic, especially since the previous study points to the vast majority of players engaging with online multiplayer games. The report details that these bots “can cause trouble by taking over user accounts, creating fake accounts to exploit benefits, and cheating. They do difficult or impossible things for human players, such as performing high-speed interactions with a game to beat human players or farming virtual currency, items, or experience points (XP) continuously.” Reading further, the report also details that 45.9% of these bad bots in the gaming space are labelled as “advanced” bots. These bots are able to achieve their goals with fewer requests to the bot, which makes them even more difficult to detect and that much more persistent. This means that the most-played games with the highest revenue streams tend to be populated with a high volume of bot activity.

The good news is that gaming itself was one of the lowest-targeted industries in 2023, with retail and travel being the main 2 businesses that bots attack. It’s important to realize, however, that the behavior of these bots in gaming is much more complex than simply phishing for accounts bound to retail entities. Bots in gaming can control the in-game economy, farm valuable items for their users and even use cheats to win against other players online. While publishers remain diligent in their efforts to ban cheaters and bots, both users and those working behind the scenes claim that they are still a persistent problem even after waves of suspensions and AI assistance. These cheaters and their bots can always provide problems for players, but a new study shows that gamers may not be as hardcore as they think.

Game & Watch

Midia Research published a report that concluded gamers spend 8.5 hours per week consuming gaming related content, specifically video content from platforms such as Twitch or YouTube, and 7.4 hours playing games. Diving in further, the report also illustrates that “24% of console and PC players watch game-related videos at least monthly” while “48% of in-game item buyers” are also monthly watchers. 

The report asserts that the industry is “ceding significant revenue opportunities — especially advertising — to third-party video platforms, even as the game market faces growth challenges”. Report author Rhys Elliot states that “it’s time for game publishers to think about in-game video as something beyond marketing alone.” These statements clearly call for an integration of this content into the games and ecosystems around them rather than allow engaged users to invest their time elsewhere.

It isn’t difficult to see why publishers want to pursue this. Roblox and Fortnite dominate Tik Tok with over 20 billion views between the two titles. Games such as Marvel Rivals have taken Twitch and YouTube by storm, though with players playing fewer hours and bot numbers on the rise, are gamers turning more towards single player titles? In the year 2024, the numbers don’t agree.

The Solo Experience 

NewZoo hails 2023 as “one of the greatest years for new AAA game releases.” This year is a different story however, and the report details that “current market conditions are making the business case for longer games less and less viable.” It concludes that game lengths have doubled since 2010 and “today’s development costs are moving past what many studios can handle. The global games market is no longer growing fast enough to provide sufficient returns on many developers’ investments, so developers must adapt to the current environment.”

After looking at Gamesindusty.biz’s numbers, it isn’t hard to see why. The only single-player focused experiences in the top 10 best sellers of the year were Elden Ring and Dragon’s Dogma 2, taking spots 9 and 10 respectively. The report also details that releases are having a harder time retaining players as well, as evidenced by Modern Warfare 3’s continued life on the market and severe player drop-offs in new releases such as Dragonball Sparking Zero. The only market where single-player games have a significant market presence is Japan, where Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake sits atop the charts, with 2023’s Super Mario Wonder coming in 4th and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth falling just outside the top 5 at number 6.

Mainstream gaming media is rife with stories of high profile single player games missing the mark in sales numbers. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth famously failed to meet expectations and while 2024’s Game of the Year, Sony’s Astro Bot from Team Asobi, sold 1.5 million copies in its first two months of release, it doesn’t compare to games such as Helldivers 2, which analyst Doug Cruetz estimated at 8 million in sales just a month after release and were “growing every week.” With this in mind, it’s easy to see how hard 2024 has been for the majority of single-player titles.

The Next Level

This month, NewZoo reported year-over-year growth for the industry at 0.2%, falling short of their projections by 1.9%. The most growth came from the mobile market, with the PC segment suffering a loss of 0.2%, again in defiance of their expectations. This means that the industry is growing even slower than projected and gamers are spending more of their waning gaming hours with games they’ve played for the better part of a decade, giving new games little room to breathe. Alongside bot traffic that outnumbers human traffic in the space by over 15%, that growth is likely even smaller than the experts and analysts are willing to admit.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t room for new franchises, however, or new games to make their claim. Balatro is an excellent example of this, with sales hitting 3.5 million just before The Game Awards, where it won Indie Game of the Year. Helldivers 2 also stormed onto the scene this year, snagging 3rd on the top 5 best-selling games, sandwiched between the half a billion selling Call of Duty titles. While backed by a strong IP, Marvel Rivals proves that the hero shooter genre will still bring fans out if the game has strong character identity and fun moment-to-moment gameplay. It also means that the formula these studios are eyeballing also still brings continued success.

The post-pandemic years have been transformative for the industry. Chasing the huge booms of that era have proven to be quite difficult and while gamers have been responding in more positive ways to different types of games, the overwhelming numbers of those who simply stick to their gaming guns doesn’t go ignored by the industry at large. With record amounts of layoffs in the industry and interest in new IP waning in favor of gamers buying their favorite franchises in whatever game they may find them in, the transformation has been one that is palpably stifling as games from yesteryear remain atop the charts in the face of award-winning experiences. It’s not a surprising phenomenon, the continued domination of Fortnite, EA Sports FC and Call of Duty in the second quarter of 2024 makes a strong case that gamers would rather play a select few games and consume content about it and others they may never play.

There is an air of unease moving into 2025 and even though there are plenty of games to look forward to, the financial backbone of the industry stays decidedly the same. Games such as Fortnite and Roblox dominate Gen Z and Gen Alpha engagement, while others barely make time to concern themselves with games that don’t get yearly installments or are the live services that they’ve been playing for the better part of a decade. While Balatro, Starfield, Marvel Rivals and Baldur’s Gate 3 offer glimmers of hope for the hardcore gaming enthusiast, those experiences are statistically less and less of what the audience at large is willing to spend their time and money on.

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