Despite the fact that the gaming market tended to grow last year, the total amount of time players spend in fresh projects is decreasing. “Old hits such as Fortnite and League of Legends are to blame for this, as they only increase their audience.

On April 2, analytical company Newzoo published its second annual report on the gaming industry, which, among other things, contains information about what people played and spent money on in 2023.

According to its data, last year the computer and video game market grew and reached $93.5 billion in revenue. However, more detailed information shows that everything is not as rosy as it seems at first glance.

Thus, on each platform, the top 10 games in terms of monthly active audience are dominated by old hits. Fortnite became the undisputed leader, taking first place on all platforms, and most of the other projects were also released a long time ago: Grand Theft Auto V, Roblox, Minecraft, Rocket League, etc.

Among the conditional “new releases” on PC, we can only mention Counter-Strike 2 and the latest Call of Duty installments, but CS2 is counted together with CS: GO, and all parts of CoD are counted as one item. On the big consoles, the only new games that can be noted are EA Sports FC 24 on PlayStation and Starfield on Xbox, while the situation on Switch is a little better, but not fundamentally.

Then things get even worse. Thus, according to Newzoo, in 2023, 80% of the total playing time was accounted for by 66 projects, and 60% of them were games 6 years old and older. At the same time, five old games – Fortnite, Roblox, League of Legends, Minecraft, GTA V – accounted for 27% of the time.

What about new games? Not very actively. Thus, only 23% of the game time was spent on “new” projects (up to 2 years old), and more than half of them are actually annual updates of large series like Madden or NBA. Only 8% of time was spent on truly new titles, such as Diablo IV or Baldur’s Gate III.

The situation is disappointing, to say the least, for players who miss large original single-player projects: publishers see that the market is much more accepting of regular updates to long-running franchises and free-to-play games with a lot of user-generated content.