The kids are playing computer games.
According to the latest Global Games Market Report from the analysts at industry intelligence firm Newzoo, Gen Alpha—defined in this case as anyone born in or after 2010—makes up “an increasing share of the player base, especially on PC.”
As a lifelong fan of computer games, this is good news to me. The kids are with us! But the kids aren’t necessarily playing the kinds of games I grew up on: You may have heard of that excruciatingly popular platform called Roblox where kids are pressured to spend their parents’ money in games like “Steal a Brainrot.” (Which, to be fair, does sound like something you’d find on Newgrounds circa 2000, so maybe we’re not all that different.)
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Earlier this week, I spoke to Newzoo director of market intelligence Emmanuel Rosier about what young gamers are up to, and two aspects of his perspective stuck out to me the most:
- Gen Alpha doesn’t care if it can run Crysis. They’re growing up playing browser games, tablet games, phone games, and games on low-powered family PCs. You can’t win the Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox generation over with ray tracing.
- They aren’t necessarily going to leave Roblox behind. It’s a common assumption, but in Rosier’s personal opinion, it’s not a sure thing that kids will age out of the Roblox ecosystem en masse.
Regarding videogame graphics, Rosier observed in a recent article that Battlefield 6 doesn’t support ray tracing, “not because the tech isn’t there, but because enabling it would exclude too many players.”
“I don’t think 8K is really the next step in the market,” he told me. “I don’t think it’s going to be about that. I don’t think the young people that were born playing on mobile or on tablet care that much about the visuals.”
Pushing graphics settings as high as they’ll go and fighting with Randy Pitchford over frame rates are still aspects of PC gaming today, but I think Rosier is clearly right that we’re no longer in a place where increased graphical fidelity is a primary selling-point for games. PC gaming is just as much something done on a low-spec family computer, or a Steam Deck.
I don’t think the young people that were born playing on mobile or on tablet care that much about the visuals.
Emmanuel Rosier
“The entry barrier on PC is lower than console, because in most families, there is already a computer, there is a laptop,” Rosier said. “But the other thing is that the younger players, they play the free-to-play cheap games that can run on any device. You don’t need a GeForce RTX 5000 to play Roblox. You just need a browser.”
But what about when the kids graduate from Roblox to the games I understand? Rosier, a parent to Roblox-playing teenagers himself, isn’t so sure that’s going to happen.
“I think there was this initial assumption from older people that Roblox is a platform for kids,” Rosier told me. “When they grow up, they will play GTA or Call of Duty and things like that. I’m questioning that perspective.
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“I’d say there is a chance that they will stay in Roblox, because all their friends are still in Roblox, and there is this network effect, that it is difficult to go and play Call of Duty alone, or, you know, you have to convince so many friends to come and play with you and spend $80 or $70 to play a different experience. And I am not sure at this point that once these teenagers, or kids, grow up, that they will start playing different games and feel like it’s a promotion.”
That uncertainty about the Roblox generation’s future as PC gamers is just Rosier’s personal opinion for now, but Roblox games are getting surprisingly sophisticated (they have their own Call of Dutys in there), and the demographic data that Roblox shares does suggest that players stick around.
“We don’t have proof,” he said. “The only thing that we see that is being shared by Roblox is that the average age of the players of Roblox is going up, but I don’t think it’s older players jumping in, it’s just the existing players that are aging and not leaving.”
Ah well, c’est la vie. If you’re looking for me this weekend, I’ll be adapting to the future by playing Break Your Bones, a Roblox game where you “Try to BREAK all of your BONES.”
In related news, another bit of Newzoo’s recent report that interested me was an analysis of videogame release windows, which led the firm to suggest that publishers consider releasing some dang games in May instead of stuffing them all into the end of the year.
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