The days of gaming as a hobby only for young people are clearly over. Unlike in the past, gamers are now sticking with console and PC games into adulthood and old age. Consumers aged 55+ account for almost...
$70 at release. Unless you need a play a game right now that price can easily drop by half or more if you wait a year for sales. There are almost no games I buy on day-one anymore.
This has the added bonus of them usually being patched to be less buggy with more quality of life improvements.
Also, $70 is still pretty cheap in the grand scheme of hobbies. Google tells me the average price of a movie ticket is $11. So rounded up that’s 1 game = 6.5 movies. If a movie is 2 hours long that’s 13 hours of enjoyment. I can easily sink 50+ hours into an AAA title (hell my wife just put 110 hours into FF VII Rebirth). That doesn’t count replayability.
That’s my point though, movies are also considered a pretty expensive hobby. People aren’t going to theaters and piracy is sky high currently because it’s simply getting too expensive for a single movie ticket. Tickets near me, for example, are $15 minimum, with some being over $20. So for my family to go to the movies it could be $100 minimum for one movie, and god forbid anyone wants snacks.
And just like gaming, you can simply wait for every movie you want to watch to end up in the bargain bin on dvd, but imo that’s a different discussion entirely. When people talk about a hobby being expensive, they’re usually not talking about the lowest possible entry point.
I guess it would be more accurate to say that gaming and movies can be expensive, not that they inherently are. Like, you can grab a Steam Deck and solely stick to grabbing indie games during sales and ultimately not spend that much, at least relative to the alternative.
$70 at release. Unless you need a play a game right now that price can easily drop by half or more if you wait a year for sales. There are almost no games I buy on day-one anymore.
This has the added bonus of them usually being patched to be less buggy with more quality of life improvements.
Also, $70 is still pretty cheap in the grand scheme of hobbies. Google tells me the average price of a movie ticket is $11. So rounded up that’s 1 game = 6.5 movies. If a movie is 2 hours long that’s 13 hours of enjoyment. I can easily sink 50+ hours into an AAA title (hell my wife just put 110 hours into FF VII Rebirth). That doesn’t count replayability.
That’s my point though, movies are also considered a pretty expensive hobby. People aren’t going to theaters and piracy is sky high currently because it’s simply getting too expensive for a single movie ticket. Tickets near me, for example, are $15 minimum, with some being over $20. So for my family to go to the movies it could be $100 minimum for one movie, and god forbid anyone wants snacks.
And just like gaming, you can simply wait for every movie you want to watch to end up in the bargain bin on dvd, but imo that’s a different discussion entirely. When people talk about a hobby being expensive, they’re usually not talking about the lowest possible entry point.
I guess it would be more accurate to say that gaming and movies can be expensive, not that they inherently are. Like, you can grab a Steam Deck and solely stick to grabbing indie games during sales and ultimately not spend that much, at least relative to the alternative.