American kids are playing fewer video games, survey says
American kids are playing fewer video games, survey says
But! This was a huge week for Roblox and for a new Pokémon phone game
The most significant drop in gaming in America in the last two years has been among children under the age of 13, according to a recent U.S. Gamer Segmentation survey by industry tracking group Circana.
The number peaked at 40.9 million kids in the summer of 2022, but has declined to 38.5 million this year, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella tells Game File.
The 2024 count is slightly lower than the 38.7 million Circana found in 2018, when it first ran the survey.
What exactly is going on?
For one, fewer Americans overall are playing games than they were during the height of Covid lockdowns. Circana found that 71% of the U.S. population now plays games, a decline from 2022.
(The Entertainment Software Association, which also surveys U.S. gamers each year, has reported a similar dampening of America’s love of video games. This year, it found that 61% of the U.S. population plays games at least an hour a week, down from 65% in 2023 and 66% in 2022. )
Kids are also playing for fewer hours each week, Piscatella said. In 2022, weekly gaming time for 2-12 year olds peaked at 17.2 hours and then dropped to 16 hours a week this year.
But… and this is one clue as to what’s happening with kids…viewing time for gaming videos and streams is up. Kids watched 8.9 hours of gaming videos a week in 2022; that’s risen to 10.1 hours a week in 2024.
So: fewer kids are playing, the kids who are playing are playing less—but kids are also watching more gaming videos.
Piscatella doesn’t see major declines among kids 2-12 on any one platform—mobile is down a tiny bit; console up a tad—but thinks what could be happening is a settling down from “what are (hopefully) outlier times in both 2020 and 2022.”
Those were peak pandemic years and they’ve impacted how many people are playing in all age groups.
“The bigger change with kids (and the entire market regardless of age) is the decline in the number of what we call ‘Incidental Players’ - the people who only play on rare occasions, most often while they're waiting for something else or doing other things,” he wrote to me in an email.
Plus, kids are back in school, going on more trips and just have more things to do than in 2020 or even 2022, he noted.
“There's more competition for the time of those kids that were playing more in the prior two periods, because they didn't have any other available options they would have preferred,” he said.
All of this tracks, even in my own household. While I didn’t introduce video games to my kids until the summer of 2022, it’s apparent even in my home where we have an elevated amount of access to video games, there are myriad distractions from their potential gaming time. We’ve got soccer practices, gymnastics lessons, friends’ birthday parties, and so many other things that wouldn’t have filled up our schedules if there were still pandemic lockdowns.
As for other factors, gaming expert and investor Matthew Ball thinks it’s also worth considering the rise of child-focused regulations and gating, including greater emphasis on parental controls on games such as Fortnite that can limit playtime. But he cautions that the changes, so far, are small: “ It's marginal change, but we are talking about marginal drift.”
Item 2: Roblox rises
Roblox says it had a record 88.9 million daily active users this past summer, per the company’s third-quarter results released on Thursday.
That’s 18 million more daily active users than the company reported for the summer of 2023.
The company’s surging performance also included $1.2 billion in net bookings (read: player spending) for the quarter. The company’s overall performance, exceeding Wall Street expectations, sent its stock up more than 20% for the week.
The strong results reversed some big drops in Roblox’s stock price from earlier this year. Those had followed scorching media or investor reports about child safety issues on the platform. (Roblox pushed back against those reports but has also initiated additional measures to protect kids and help parents).
Given today’s lead item about kids drifting from games, I pulled Roblox’s user counts for kids under 13. This is not directly comparable to the Circana survey, in part because this is for users worldwide. Nevertheless…
While you can see a pretty obvious growth trajectory, look closely and you may spot the steeper-than-normal rise in early 2020 when the pandemic locked the world down.
You’ll also see some fluctuations, including some occasional dips, starting in 2022.
But, yeah, the kids are playing a lot of Roblox. The app coming to more platforms in recent years has likely helped with that, too.
Item 3: Monster launch for a new mobile Pokémon
Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, the iOS and Android digital version of Pokémon card collecting and battling (aka a mobile game I will never dare tell my kids about), had a massive debut on Wednesday, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
Pokémon TCG had 1.2 million downloads and made $1.9 million in revenue worldwide on launch day, Sensor Tower analyst Sam Aune told me (The Pokémon Company has not released official numbers).
That would make the game the third largest mobile release of all time in terms of revenue, Aune said, though cautioned the data is based on a preliminary estimate.
Sensor Tower estimates the game made $2.8 million in revenue on its second day.
That’s very strong but doesn’t necessarily mean the game will be the new king of mobile. “Having a huge launch day is not necessarily 1:1 correlated with mega success,” Aune said. “Mega-hit games like Monopoly Go, Royal Match, and Honor of Kings didn't necessarily have huge launch days, instead taking a more conservative approach, scaling up over time.”
Item 4: Remember these hits?
More numbers for you… Circana has also published a chart showing the 20 best-selling games in the U.S. from 2000-2023.
It’s a handy historical reference:
Witness the early 2000s sales power of Tony Hawk games.
Marvel at three of 2008’s top three games being plastic-guitar music games.
Behold the chart’s most common terms: Madden (25 times), Mario (29) and Call of Duty (35).
A few games are conspicuously absent from the charts, and not for the Circana group’s lack of trying. Some big games such as Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and Baldur’s Gate III (2023) aren’t there, Circana’s Mat Piscatella tells Game File, because not every publisher shares digital sales data with the firm (alas!).
Item 5: In brief
🎮 The closure of PlayStation-owned studio Firewalk will impact 174 workers, according to a notice filed to Washington State, where the Concord-maker was based.
After Sony announced Firewalk’s shutdown on Tuesday, the studio posted a group farewell that summarized the team’s accomplishments.
They wrote, in part: “We took some risks along the way – marrying aspects of card battlers and fighting games with first-person-shooters – and although some of these and other aspects of the IP didn’t land as we hoped, the idea of putting new things into the world is critical to pushing the medium forward.”
📈 Microsoft’s gaming content and services revenue was up for its summer quarter by 61% compared to a year ago (53 of that coming from recently acquired Activision Blizzard King), but hardware was down 29%, The Verge reports.
During a call with investors, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which was release last week (well after the summer quarter) was the biggest launch in the series, with increased unit sales on PlayStation and PC (on Xbox, its sales may be impacted by it also launching on Game Pass, which, of course, is likely to be a major boost for that service).
🎮 Fandom, which owns GameSpot, Giant Bomb, Metacritic and other influential gaming sites, has laid off 11% of its staff, Aftermath reports
“We are at the whims of algorithms, errant ideas for speculative success and shots in the dark, all of which are largely out of the control of the people you see making the videos and writing the words,” GameSpot managing editor Tamoor Hussain wrote on social media, in a lament for those laid off and for the state of games media..
📉 Ubisoft’s earnings for April-September 2024, announced Wednesday, reflected the struggles of Star Wars Outlaws, which Ubisoft recently warned investors had underperformed. Sales revenue was down nearly 20% from the same stretch in 2023, Games Industry reports.
Ubisoft headcount was down nearly 800 people, to 18,666 as of September 30, 2024, compared to a year ago, executives said, as the company promises to cut costs (and Ubisoft is still considering sales of “non-core” parts of the company).
🤔 Ubisoft has released its first Web3 game, the PC strategy game Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, which lets users buy and sell virtual figurines via a crypto marketplace.
The most expensive figure in the game’s marketplace is a “Swift Zealot” selling for the equivalent of $63,372.19, though, as Kotaku noted, the most recently listed figures are in the $5-200 range.
🚘 One more Ubisoft thing: The company’s 2023 racing game The Crew Motorfest will soon get working rearview mirrors, the company said. They’ll be part of an update for the PC and current-gen console versions next week.
🟨 The PlayDate Stereo Dock, which would have added a speaker (and a pen?!) to the little yellow gaming handheld is on hold after multiple manufacturing fiascoes, parent company Panic said in an unusually blunt and descriptive update.
They wrote: “Eventually we hit that painful line: we’re spending more to make this product than we are likely to ever make back from it.”
🥽 Fireproof Games, makers of the excellent puzzle-room series The Room, have announced their first new game since 2020. Ghost Town is a detective/puzzle VR game set in London in 1983, set for an early 2025 release on Meta’s Quest headset, with PC and PSVR2 to follow.
❗️ PUBG Studios is making a 5v5 top-down PvP shooter called Project ARC, Eurogamer reports.
Item 6: The week ahead
Tuesday, November 5
Metal Slug Tactics (PC, console) is released.
Nintendo reports quarterly results (Possible Switch 2 mention alert!).
Something else happens in the U.S.
Wednesday, November 6
Take Two reports quarterly results (Possible GTA 6 mention alert! FYI: Rockstar super-fans think they’ve figured out the date of the next GTA 6 trailer based on the phases of the moon; really!)
Thursday, November 7
Mario & Luigi Brothership (Switch) and Picross-meets-Minesweeper-meets-Bruegel game Proverbs (PC) are released.
Friday, November 8
Slitterhead (PC, console), a new horror game from a studio led by Keiichiro Toyama, the lead creator of the Silent Hill, Siren and Gravity Rush, is released.
Sony reports quarterly results.
Item 7: Political game predicts Trump, ever so slightly
The Political Machine 2024, the latest in a long-running series of strategy games that are released by developer/publisher Stardock every four years, is seeing a slight edge for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in its simulation of next week’s U.S. Presidential contest.
The Political Machine games are designed to let players role-play the current election cycle and see who they can get into the Oval Office.
To help promote the games, Stardock runs election simulations. This year, their simulation ran the election more than 500 times, with in-game events and political-action cards (in-game tokens used to swing the election) disabled, a Stardock rep told Game File.
As you can see from the map above, they had Pennsylvania going to Harris, but two other swing states, Wisconsin and Nevada, went to Trump.
North Carolina, not Pennsylvania, wound up being the key battleground state, Stardock said. And it leaned Trump in the simulation.
Stardock says earlier editions of the game ran simulations that correctly called 2008 and 2012 for Obama, 2016 for Trump and 2020 for Biden.
When I wrote about the 2016 edition of the game in February of that year—months before Trump clinched the Republican nomination—I noted that players using the former Apprentice host in the game, rather than Jeb Bush and the like, won more than with any other candidate. I wrote at the time: “The Political Machine isn’t a crystal ball. It’s not science, either, so don’t go expecting Trump to narrowly edge out Sanders in the general election.” Half-right, I guess.
(Full disclosure: I’m voting Harris next week and explained why today on social media. TLDR: It’s all about the Supreme Court.)
I was just running The Political Machine earlier today, good timing! 8 runs of Trump v Harris in a row went to Trump, interestingly running Trump v Biden went to Biden (though I only ran it once).