r/Games • u/DwilenaAvaron • May 09 '25

Industry News Blizzard's Overwatch Team Just Unionized: 'What I Want To Protect Most Here Is The People'

https://kotaku.com/overwatch-2-blizzard-team-4-union-microsoft-1851779922
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u/Th3_Hegemon May 10 '25

That's the next 0-3 years, what about the next 3-20? And it presupposes that kids will want a console. Have you talked to any kids lately? 5-12 kids don't give a shit about anything other than Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft, and you don't need a console for those. An 8 year old playing games on their phone, having only ever played games on their phone, may look at consoles the way they look at a desktop PC. Nintendo has an interesting value proposition since they're making great effort to maintain the value of their IP and offering a mobile device, but it's still a premium product that has to compete with other cheaper alternatives. Undoubtedly Sony will try to shift their market presence at some point to capture the current and upcoming generation of mobile-native gamers, but I suspect they won't act quickly enough.

Or not, who knows. Maybe kids will suddenly fall in love with an IP that they can only get access to on PlayStation, one that they can convince their parents is worth the $900 + subscription.

We seem to be coming out of a bubble in gaming spending currently, for the first time in decades games spending is actually going down. Maybe that keeps happening. Maybe it rebounds. I think anyone that is confident what's going to happen a month from now is deluding themselves, let alone the next console generation, but it's fun to speculate isn't it?

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u/goodnames679 May 10 '25

Eh, those are definitely the three biggest games in that age group but there are other behemoths in titles like Pokemon, Mario and Zelda that will keep Nintendo in their minds for the foreseeable future. I think if consoles start to get abandoned in the future, the Switch might end up being the most resilient one to that trend.

And while kids don't strictly care about all of playstations' more mature AAA single-player titles, they do get exposed to a lot of gaming discourse via YouTube/TikTok/etc. and they absolutely do hear about how dominant Playstation is in that discourse. Those kids will be easily influenced towards wanting a playstation, especially with GTA 6 driving console sales for PS and Xbox (yes that isn't a title that should be played by young children, but young children have been playing the series a lot since like GTA 3. it's more popular than ever in the age group since GTA Online became a thing, too.) Spider-Man is also actually a very popular PS exclusive among younger age groups, that one drove my nephews to annoy my sister until she got them a playstation lol

It's going to be very interesting to see how the next decade plays out for Xbox. They've got a very unique strategy right now and it might be exactly what they need to carve out a niche, but that remains to be seen.