Xbox & PlayStation's Most-Played Games In 2023 Were Averaging Seven Years Old

Also, I would bet that for Nintendo, a similar thing is happening with Mario Kart 8, originally a WiiU title rereleased on Switch that has been consistently in the top 5 sales charts for what may be close to a decade.

To me, that just confirms what I feel about Gaming (or more the Publishers). Games haven't really evolved in the past 10yrs - Graphics may have, but game-play, stories etc have not - maybe even regressed in some cases.

A LOT of the Big releases are sequels or remasters that don't really bring anything 'new'. The rest are either some Live Service template wrapped in a well known 'IP skin' to sell - Marvels Avengers, DC's Suicide Squad etc - or some unfinished, rushed to release game that seems sent out to die. Even new IP's seem to be 'generic' and predictable plots, generic/bland characters etc with a 'generic' game-play loop - where the only aspect that feels new/modern is the Graphics.

Many old games still stand up today as the Characters, the Story, the plot etc are better than many new games offer. Its not surprising to see many 'Online/MP' games as they do offer more 'hours' and certainly fun with friends/family.

I mean, this is exactly what these games were designed for, right? To be constantly updated and tweaked and have new skins, modes and whatnot added to them, in order to keep as many people playing them as possible. Mission accomplished, I'd say.

Kids are not into the traditional games. They treat fortnite, etc as the platform and disregard everything else. It makes me wonder what 10 years from now will be like when traditional gamers are a tiny niche group of the gaming landscape. It would be interesting to see the average age of gamers playing big single-player games like god of War, starfield, etc. It is probably closer to 40 than 20.

I also don't help these stats as I am currently playing saints row 2 and assassins creed 3 on pc. Recently replayed the original star Wars dark forces and quake 1 as well. I love old games.

It is also a testament to the backwards compatibility interest on these platforms. Pc is by far the best option to have older games available for purchase and nintendo is by far the worst.

Makes sense, fortnite and rocket league initially came to mind.
I do be playing lots of rl.
Although I thought the newer fifa&cod games would be able to even the odds, at least pulling in the other yearly sports games I figured they might be able to even the odds alas.

I'm proud of the human race that Skyrim didn't make it to this list

People are boring

I used to play GTA online and a bit of Minecraft. Got bored of them and don't think I'll pick it up again.

@BacklogBrad The average age of console gamers was 33 several years ago so I think you're definitely right that big console games have older audiances than people think.

That's depressing. The PC, PS, and XB lists are basically identical minus one or two entries.

The gaming industry has kind of ruined itself. With a quest for making the most played permanent game ever, they eventually succeeded and created a list of a handful of games that are really the only games that matter. If the rest of the industry fell off a cliff, engagement would barely change. Where does the industry go from here, if new games don't actually matter?

And this is why everyone chases the live service gold rush. The only way a game matters is to become bigger than one of these, and make one of these irrelevant. It's also why Xbox has a hard time getting anywhere and why "more games" won't fix its woes. 100 TLOUs won't fix the fact that if you're not the console everyone chose to play these games on, you still lose, and the majority already chose another console to play these games on and are set for life.

This is where both Jim and Phil, right or wrong, have been coming from. For Jim the push on not bothering with new games, throwing everything behind trying to become the next big live service and just re-releasing old content forever is because of this list. PS sells as the default box to play these games on. That's why it's #1 and for no other reason.

It's also why Phil chases his tail with "cloud is easier than console so it's the future", "no, Game pass flat fee is the way to get people to enter the ecosystem to play more games cheaper, it's the future", "nope console is dead, ever upgrading PC hardware is the future."

Both of them face a problem from different sides - Jim with "how to STAY #1 when nothing you do actually matters because all that matters is something that was done 10 years ago by someone else", and Phil with "how do you claw your way from #3 when the market doesn't want anything they don't already have?"

But it's also why fans are wrong with "Xbox is getting out of platforms because it isn't #1, people only need PS, Xbox/Sony need more games!" At this point the pecking order is set and isn't going to change because where the chips landed for this old content is where things will permanently stay unless something major shifts things. But there's still a lot of money on the floor on the edges, and that's really where MS is trying to plant some flags, in the "the everything else" of gaming, and succeeding fairly well. It's also where Jim dropped the ball, and despite selling tons of consoles to people to play these games, can't seem to turn a decent profit, because this sells hardware, but doesn't actually make a lot of money if you're not pulling the change from the couch cushions in the "everything else" category. # of consoles sold no longer actually means a profitable base to sell games to. It means people just upgrading their GPU for the same old game on hardware that doesn't really make much profit because the model is to subsidize hardware on the expectation of selling a lot of software to recoup. And that's why (in addition to a change in the pricing of hardware components no longer depreciating) Phil's talking about the end of the cheap, subsidized hardware model. You'll pay full, profit-bearing price for your hardware, like PC, to just play Fortnite with better graphics on, or make do with weaker hardware. They can't make their money back on you for it unless you're a whale.

Heck, Xbox has a (for now) first party exclusive on its list and PS doesn't. So much for "exclusives matter"

Meanwhile Nintendo proves that its market is a completely different from the rest of the gaming market. Yet its market doesn't behave that differently within its own space. Minus Fortnite of course, the universal #1, but of course at this point Fortnite isn't really a video game, it's a social media app with guns. Or is that repeating myself?

@FraserG nvm, the Kotaku link answered that.

@RBRTMNZ Actually if the average age is 33 that's a pretty good midpoint to say the general age spectrum is well distributed from young to old. It would skew much older than that if players were mostly older than 33, and not many younger than 33.

The bigger problem is the half that's younger than 33 to pull the average down from the half that's older than 33 is just playing Fortnite, NBA/FIFA, and GTAV.

I wonder what todays kids will be nostalgic for in the future. Will it just be a subsection of Roblox?

I suppose that's what happens when the industry focusses on the "Live service" model. You get a stagnation of big hitters, and anything new (including new live services) are starved out. All those games except for Starfield (and Minecraft to a lesser degree) focus on providing continuous new content and microtransactions.

So basically you end up stuck in a cycle of companies spending ungodly sums on making the next big service, failing, and putting developers out of jobs when they could all be making new fun games you play for a bit and then play something new.

@NEStalgia The data is a bit outdated by a few years so it stand to reason the average age has risen. I feel like a lot of people under 50 who grew up with the hobby are forever gamers.

@RBRTMNZ I think that will still hold true for all generations, but IDK what the games played by zoomers when they're 40 will look like. Maybe it'll still just be Fortnite. With more ray tracing. They won't be craving remakes of single player story driven games. It's not what they remember. It's the "social experiences of shared online gaming" they'll be nostalgic for. I want to gag.

@PhileasFragg In fairness, PC gaming has always been that way. Quake was popular forever and ever because of mods, basically the free crowdsourced version of "GaaS", and more or less still is, until it was supplanted by Half Life 1 which had the same life cycle, etc. That was in the 90's. In some ways the industry is running up against human nature I think. Where console games were originally a churn of new boxed consumable games, since as long as "online games" have existed, even when it was "service" by community mod makers, all over dialup, it formed the same kind of stagnation that everyone just joins into the biggest thing and stays with that one thing for as long as it exists. Diablo 1 and 2, kind of the same. It's also a problem that an online game does kind of echo how social media works. For the same reason that Facebook and TwiXer can't be moved, it's the same reason the big games can't be. In 2097 people will still be playing Fortnite and GTAV. And Quake and Diablo 2 in droves.

Basically we stopped needing new games in 2010. By then we had all the games we would ever need forever more and they can run forever.

Chess may be the oldest live service evergreen title ever, after all. Now AI companion mods are all the rage.

Heck, isn't Baldur's Gate 3 basically just the latest expansion module for the same D&D game from the 1960s?

@RBRTMNZ If we're thinking about the same data that produced that average age, then there are some major caveats, most notably that it was a survey of adults: countless millions of kids and teens were excluded, drastically inflating the average!

Anecdotally, I'm inclined to think there are more gamers under 18 than there are over 30, but even if my observation is wrong, the average has to be lower than 33 (35, 36, whatever they're saying it is), especially if we're tracking core/frequent gamers.

@smoreon I’ve seen similar data from several sources show that the average gamer is in their 30s. Most notably Nintendo has reported that the majority of switch users are between 23-35 to its investors on multiple occasions. It really seems like gaming is a millennial hobby.

This just shows the current state of gaming which is not good in my opinion.

Only three games have a true single player campaign on the list (CoD, GTA, and Starfield). Only one of them is driven by the SP experience (Starfield) whereas the other two GTA and CoD probably made the list based on their MP experience.

Legions of younger gamers coming of age dramatically affects this ranking. They're playing what their peers are playing and as soon as you're old enough for GTA V, well VI isn't here yet so... I think older generations are playing a much wider variety of games and when you're as old as me, mostly solitary single player games (with the odd Helldivers 2 dance here and there).

@BacklogBrad

Is Nintendo the worst? Is it, tho? I mean, look at Playstation and their stupid streaming nonsense.. it's by FAR the worst option to play older titles.

But yes, Nintendo probably is second worst; they should've made all the older titles available to buy.

@Maubari if nintendo's follow up to the switch is fully backwards compatible with the switch like I imagine it will be then I might put them ahead of playstation. But until i actually see my physical and digital switch games on the new gen i wont assume it will be fully bc. They seem to love reselling minimum effort remasters from last gen for full price. Their physical cartridges make me wonder what form they will be in the future as well. Are they married to this size cart now or will they reinvent that in one of the next gens and render all physical switch games unplayable?

It also frustrates me that they had a very cool virtual console on previous platforms but instead are locking those games behind a subscription.

I realize sony does some of these things too but I am more confident that my physical and digital sony games will continue to work on future consoles. Even if Nintendo keeps offering physical games, who knows what form the plastic cartridges will be in the future. At least sony and xbox will be disc based until they go all digital.

The gaming industry sure isn't what it used to be. I remember when the top 10 was dominated by new releases. Says a lot about the type of games people want to play today, as well as the pace of popular releases among the general public. So much in the way of new hype seems to revolve around games only the hardcore gamer community is into.

I contribute to this article. I'm well over the average age of gamers and the video games I play are seldom new. The past year has included replays of Far Cry 3 and 4, New Dawn, and now Primal. Been online recently for some horsing around in RDR2. Next up may be a replay of the first 2 Metro games, its been about 4 years since my last play.

@RBRTMNZ That's odd- all I found was an infographic by Nintendo, showing that 20-somethings were the largest group. (That is also apparently skewed slightly, with a noticeable spike where younger kids reported their birthdate as 2000.)

I'll have to see what else I can dig up, but thanks for the tip on it being an investor report, as that should help with the search.

It would also indicate that people aren't rushing out and paying $70 for 'New' games - opting to engage with 'older' and/or 'cheaper' games. A Lot of NEW games aren't exactly at their best and/or most playable either until months, sometimes years later (look at Cyberpunk for example).

Its often a lot safer (financially) to play an older game than risk buying something 'new' at launch. With modern consoles, even if they are a few years old now, you have so much choice thanks to Backwards Compatibility adding 1000's to the Library with MANY bargains and of course Sub services too offering many games 'free'.

Therefore you can play all these 'older' games whilst waiting for new games to be worth playing and prices to drop too...

Average age 7.2?? is exactly why I mute most lobbies if I play online... there's nothing worse 😫