All thanks to such giants as Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft
NewZoo analysts have published a report describing the gaming market at the end of 2023, as well as giving a forecast for the coming years.
In addition to fairly standard data on growth indicators, the report also contains very unusual information, including indicating certain problems in the gaming industry that are not entirely obvious.
The bottom line is that one of the problems in the gaming industry — it's herself. More precisely, successful old games, against which new games must be no worse in order to earn their place in the market.
The situation is perfectly expressed in numbers. On PC, the average age of the top 10 games of 2023 by monthly active users was 9.6 years! That is, the most popular games — old games. PlayStation and Xbox are doing only slightly better: 7.4 and 7.2 years, respectively. This suggests that fairly old games are more popular than most newer ones. Of course, we are talking here primarily about multi-user projects that have been supported for years, but still the situation is indicative. Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are great examples.
But there is still a platform where people actually play mainly new games — This is Nintendo Switch. Here, the top 5 includes two 2023 games (Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder), and the average age of the top 10 games is 3.9 years. But the situation here is due to the fact that there are much fewer multiplayer projects on the Switch and there are not many of these games from the list of the most popular on other platforms. Although Fortnite is the leader on Switch, as well as on all other systems.
In general, in 2023, on all platforms, games older than 6 years accounted for more than 60% of gaming time. And it’s also worth considering that a number of popular new games — these are simply the latest installments in long-running series like Call of Duty and sports simulators, which often change very little from year to year. As a result, truly fresh projects accounted for only 8% of all gaming time in 2023. Mainly thanks to Diablo IV, Hogwarts Legacy and Baldur's Gate III.