Just 66 titles saw 80 percent of all playtime in 2023, most older games like Fortnite or GTA 5
The PC and console market grew by 2.6% to $93.5 billion in revenue last year, according to a new report by video games date company Newzoo (cheers, Kotaku!) That’s good, right? Growth is universally a good thing, otherwise all those nice, dead-eyed men in suits wouldn’t keep saying it was. You can’t just lie about growth, that’s a business crime. However, here’s some slightly more worrying news, depending on how much you value new ideas: Of all the game time that gamers spent gaming in quantifiable Big Year for Gaming 2023, just 20% of that time was gamed on games other than the 66 specific games mentioned in the report.
Even more troublesome for novelty enjoyers is the revelation that a huge chunk of 2023’s playtime was spent in games that were at least six years old or older. You’ve likely already predicted the top candidates, looming over the landscape, warring for territory like the Godfather’s five families. Fortnite, League of Legends, GTA 5, Minecraft, and Roblox took a sizeable 27% of all playtime between them. All told, as Kotaku point out, “Only 8 percent of video game playtime was spent on new, non-annual titles like Diablo 4 or Baldur's Gate 3.”
It all sounds damning on the surface, although I think it’s probably worth pointing out that many of these players don’t necessarily represent lost market share for new, single player titles and the like, since many of the games mentioned represent entire hobbies in themselves. Still, it’s a shock and slightly disappointing to see so many hands grabbing for the same plate of chips at the buffet while more interesting offerings get left to grow cold on the periphery, struggling to find an audience, and causing publishers to become ever more risk adverse in the process.
Earlier in the year, RPS spoke to Nightingale lead and ex-Bioware developer Aaryn Flynn, who had this to say on the difficulty of breaking into a market dominated by a handful of, usually live service, games:
"The idea that the games industry is a
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