Video game spending has dropped almost 25% amongst young people

Young adults are spending less and less across the board, but the games industry has been hit the hardest.

Gaming has never been the cheapest of hobbies, but it has undeniably become more expensive in recent years, to the point that many have had to cut back their spending.

Not only has the price of consoles gone up, with the Nintendo Switch 2’s £395.99 price tag considered affordable by comparison, but so have the games. The ninth generation began with Sony insisting it had to start charging £70 for games and now we have Nintendo asking up to £75 for Mario Kart World.

Regardless of where you stand on whether such price increases accurately reflect the value of the games, there’s no doubt that they’re a key factor in why spending on gaming as a whole is seeing a decline, especially amongst young adults.

Matt Piscatella, executive director and industry analyst at Circana, has shared a chart on Bluesky collating data on the average weekly spending among adults aged 18 to 24 in the US, within the four weeks ending in April 2025.

Aside from gaming, the data covers spending on things like houseware, accessories, and clothing.

Compared to the same period of time in 2024, there have been sharp declines in spending among young adults in all areas, with gaming seeing the largest impact – a drop of nearly 25%.

For what it’s worth, video game spending among all other age groups hasn’t declined as much, but it’s still dropped by about 1 or 2%. This isn’t universal among other industries though, with spending on sports equipment and beauty products up this year.

While this data is specifically for the US, spending habits between it and the UK aren’t dissimilar, so it’s safe to assume that more or less the same applies here. Even if it didn’t, the US is a massive and important market for the games industry, so this should still be cause for concern amongst games companies.

This all lines up with past data. Last year, chip company AMD (which both Sony and Microsoft are partnering with on their next consoles) admitted that demand for gaming had become ‘quite weak.’

Earlier this year, another Circana report revealed that more than 70% of active PlayStation 5 and Xbox players in the US were dedicating a significant amount of time to playing at least one of the 10 most popular live service games, such as Fortnite, Call Of Duty, and Roblox, rather than any new releases.

A big part of this is because they’re free-to-play, so there’s less of a barrier to entry. As such, anyone who enjoys games but can’t justify spending upwards of £80 on new releases is more likely to shift their attention to free-to-play fare.

This in turn stands to further incentivise studios into making live service games, which earn their money through microtransactions; a strategy Sony has obsessively chased for years, with very little success beyond Helldivers 2 (which wasn’t even made in-house).

But even that isn’t guaranteed to address the industry’s woes, as evidenced by how many live service games have crashed and burned over the years. This is best exemplified by a March report that showed the vast majority of PC players are not only primarily playing live service games, but ones that were at least two years old.

With the likes of Counter-Strike and League Of Legends still holding a fierce chokehold on the market, what chance do any new live service games have?

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