2024 Year-To-Date Spending Is 1% Higher Than A Year Ago, Says Circana Report

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 This report comes from August 2024, so it's slightly out of date by this point, as we are fast approaching November 2024.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.

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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