A survey conducted by IGN’s parent company in coordination with UC Berkeley and Kantar has found that buying habits among self-described “hardcore” gamers vary greatly from generation to generation. But they found at least one uniformity across the generations: the majority of them aren’t buying their games new. Instead, they’re buying later and playing longer.

As reported by Video Games Chronicle, the percentage of those willing to buy at game new for full price goes down with preceeding generation. Forty-two percent of Gen Z gamers who were surveyed said they’re willing to buy their games new, while only 38% of Millenials and 20% of Gen Xrs said the same. This is to say, that most of us who are interested in games enough to follow gaming news, watch trailers or discuss them like we are right now, prefer waiting for sales over rushing out to grab stuff the first chance they can.

The article quotes a man by the name of Christopher Ding, who’s associated with The Games Business website, in regard to why this is. Ding chalks it up to everyone already having a ton of entertainment at their fingertips, so there’s less perceived need for new stuff. He also posits that new games tending to release either broken or in need of updates also is having an impact upon these numbers.

I’d say that that’s just a nice way of saying that gamers don’t have to just accept whatever garbage AAA chucks out anymore. And yeah, they’ve kind of shot themselves in the foot by keeping up the practice of “ship it now, patch it later (maybe)” for so many years now. I’d say it’s kind of cool to see all of us game enthusiasts coming together to the point where our buying habits now make that ethos less viable, but then we have to remember that the casual crowd behaves differently and is much more numerous.

Ther are some other interesting things found by the survey, though. One of them is that younger gamers prefer multiplayer, while older ones prefer single player, and those tendencies increase in both directions when it comes to age. Older gamers tend to prefer the game experience while younger ones tend to enjoy the social experience surrounding the game. There’s more to it, and you should definitely check out the article for the full breakdown, but it’s still intereting to see all the same, don’t you think?

I’m curious to see what this means, if anything for gaming moving forward. Lately there’ve been great rumblings that the live service era is coming to and end, with companies like SEGA shifting back to prioritizing traditional games rather than continuing to chase the live service dragon like many of their peers. Maybe we’ll see a rise of higher budget “friend” games as companies seek to capitalize on Gen Z and Alpha’s interest in social experiences over solitary ones.

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What do you think? Do find this at all surprising? How do you think companies will adjust to this knowledge?