Newzoo: There are reasons why the market may still grow

gamesindustry.biz:

Newzoo has recently published its PC and Console Gaming Report 2024, providing invaluable insight into the current trends and challenges of the games industry.

And while layoffs and studio closures are the current headlines dominating the news cycle, there are reasons to be optimistic and ways to be successful in the industry, if you apply the right lessons that the current landscape is teaching us.

For instance, Newzoo's lead analyst Tom Wijman points to a trend the data firm highlighted in the report, showing declining playtime. But there's more to it than meets the eye.

"Even though it's declining, a larger share of that smaller pie is going towards games that are over six years old, or older still – so what does that mean in terms of what time is available if you are developing or launching a new game?

"This should, in our opinion, start impacting the choices of monetisation models game developers and publishers are pursuing. Because the fact is, it is extremely difficult to succeed as a live service game that primarily tries to grow by capturing people's time, the logic being that if you get people to play first, then they start spending. And that's just a logical relationship, but what we wanted to show is just how hard it is to get into this market, because you are competing with games that have been successfully grabbing people's attention for over six years, in some cases even over ten years. And those games are not going away, they're actually growing… At the same time, it's not all doom and gloom.

"Within that smaller segment of time, a lot of games are considered very successful. That is still entirely possible, but it does impact what choices to make. And that's the message that we wanted to bring with us."

Wijman says that the share of playtime for newer games was a fraction of the total playtime last year, even among the most successful titles of 2023. Baldur's Gate 3 got 0.6% of the total playtime in 2023, and Starfield got 0.3%, for example.

"Hogwarts