A new Circana report highlights how the Video Game Market is currently performing. Mat Piscatella posted the results from the report on BlueSky. This report comes from August 2024, so it’s slightly out of date by this point, as we are fast approaching November 2024. The report’s projected U.S. total spending on video game hardware, content, and accessories fell by 7% during August 2024 compared to last year. Considering the current state of the games industry right now, this isn’t as bad as it could be. The positive of the financial report is that 2024 year-to-date spending is now 1% higher than it was a year ago, coming in at $36.6 billion.
Most of the gaming spending right now is on mobile content, with a 5% increase, which was offset by declines in other categories. Video game content spending has increased by 4%, with 3% of it being driven by mobile spending. Accessories for gaming saw an 8% increase, which helped to offset the 28% drop in video game hardware spending.
At the moment, the gaming industry is in a rocky place, and most places in the world are in some kind of financial crisis, which makes spending on games, accessories, and particularly hardware quite tricky. In addition to this, games are increasingly expensive, especially for triple-A games. For those on PC, purchasing new gear and upgrading pre-existing rigs are difficult, as new games require more powerful rigs to run even on minimum settings.
During August, top games across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox saw a lot of sports games coming out on top, including Madden NFL 25, EA Sports College Football 25, and EA Sports MVP Bundle.
Surprisingly, Star Wars Outlaws took the third position of best-selling premium games in August. Considering that the game didn’t sell as much as Ubisoft had hoped, gamers across the globe poorly reviewed it. Helldivers II remains in the top charts, as well as Minecraft being a continual mainstay in the reports released by Circana.
The report states that August video game hardware spending dropped by 36% compared to the previous month. All consoles have significantly decreased, but the Nintendo Switch has suffered the most, with a sharp decline year-on-year by 41%. In this report, the PlayStation 5 led the month’s hardware in both unit and dollar sales. In future reports, it’s likely that the PlayStation 5 will continue to lead, as they have announced the release of the 30th Anniversary collection and the PlayStation 5 Pro.
In August, the PS5 DualSense Wireless Controller in Midnight Black was the best-selling accessory in dollar sales, with the PlayStation Portal continuing to be the best seller for 2024. It’s possible that the PlayStation 5 Pro and the 30th Anniversary Collection will soon be in the best-selling reports in the future.
