Data Deep Dive: What Are the Zoomers REALLY Playing?
How will the habits of the next generation of players reshape the games industry? We spoke with three leading market research firms about their findings.
There’s no shortage of discussion about the generation born roughly between 1997 and 2012. The oldest Gen Zers (at 27) are just barely too young to remember a world before the internet, and the youngest zoomers (at 12) have spent a third of their lives in a “post-COVID” world.
It’s an eclectic bunch. But one thing is certain about the zoomers: they love video games. An enormous 91% of 13–17 year-olds play games every week, and they’re playing over 7 hours per week on average.1 But what exactly, other than the obvious live-service titans like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft, are these kids spending all those gaming hours on?
This week, we spoke with three leading market research firms—Newzoo, ZBD, and YPulse—each of whom has conducted in-depth surveys of Gen Z gamers this year. The firms have graciously allowed us to share their findings with A16Z GAMES readers.
That story below. But first, this week’s news from the future.
News From the Future
🎮 Interview: Valve on the Future of the Steam Deck (Reviews.org)
In a rare sit-down interview with Valve employees, Valve talked a bit about their strategy for the handheld going forward, including explaining why they aren’t going to pursue yearly hardware refreshes. “There’s no reason to do that,” said Valve designer Lawrence Yang. “And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better.”
🎨 Epic’s ambitious digital asset shop is now open (The Verge)
Epic Games has launched its promised Fab marketplace, which is designed to serve as a unified place to get digital assets like environments and animations. Per the Verge: “The launch of the marketplace is an important step in Epic’s plans to make it easier for developers to acquire assets for developing games—and, maybe someday, to let them make content for an interoperable metaverse.”
📱 Age of Empires Mobile officially launches (Pocket Gamer)
We’ve seen a relative slowdown of major console and PC franchises coming to mobile in the last year, but the mobile version of Age of Empires—developed by Level Infinite, known for their work on PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings—appears to be off to a good start. Whether the mobile adaptation can satisfy both series newcomers and longtime PC fans is a challenge that remains to be seen.
🧠 Manifest raises $3.4 million, asks “Can AI make us feel less alone?” (TechCrunch)
A16Z GAMES SPEEDRUN alum Manifest, founded by Amy Wu, is creating an AI-based mental health app that aims to help combat the loneliness epidemic facing Gen Zers. “School teaches you all these things…” Wu says, “but it doesn’t teach you how to go build your own emotional toolkit.”
Data Deep Dive: What Are the Zoomers REALLY Playing?
Distinct, named generations are a slippery concept.
The boundaries are made up, for one thing, with differing start and end dates depending on who you’re talking to. And the age ranges we’re talking about here are very wide: The oldest millennials are now in their early 40s, and the youngest zoomers still aren’t allowed to drive.
But for the purpose of this piece, when we talk about zoomers we’re really just talking about teenagers and people in their twenties. And the question the A16Z GAMES team had to know about this group is: what are they REALLY playing?
To learn the answer, we started by digging into the data with market research firm Newzoo, who earlier this year conducted a survey of 73,000 people across 36 global markets to gauge their gaming habits.
Newzoo and the New Game Seekers
When tackling the question of “what are people playing,” research firms often use a genre framework to categorize games.
But as fewer and fewer top franchises and live service titles have begun soaking up a greater share of game hours, it makes more sense to look at individual titles and franchises.
According to Newzoo’s Global Gamer Study for 20242, the top eight titles and franchises for Gen Z players are a familiar bunch:
In Newzoo’s report on the subject, the authors wrote that—because of the wide age range covered in the Gen Z cohort—many of these “top” games are being played by different segments players. “Most likely, many Gen Z players are only digging into Minecraft, while others dedicate most of their time to Call of Duty,” the report concludes.
This suggestion, that most players are sticking with only one or two games, is borne out by another set of questions Newzoo asked, particularly whether players agree with the statement “I often seek out and try new or trending games.”
Only a small slice of the global gaming audience—31% of PC and console players and 26% of mobile players—agreed.
That data seems bleak, but it gets interesting when you zoom in on those who identify as “new game seekers” and split their data by generational cohort.
The new game seekers skew male (62% vs. 37% female) and young. Only 9% of “new game seekers” are Gen X or older (44+).
The biggest slice of new game seekers are the zoomers, which make up 42% of new game seekers.
Things get interesting when you ask new game seekers from PC/console segment about their most-played games. The top five slots on the list look awfully similar to the wider group (including those who don’t often seek out new games).
But past that you begin to see a fresh mix, including long-established titles that have recently shipped new series entrants.
In other words, new game seekers (of which nearly half are zoomers) are hooked on the big franchises and live-service monsters just like everyone else.
But they also dip out to indulge in hot new game releases.
“My hypothesis is that Gen Z does not look that different from millennials in what they are playing outside of the major live service titles,” says Devan Brennan, Senior Management Consultant at Newzoo. “Essentially they are also jumping from the most recent hype title to the next one, e.g. Palworld, Enshrouded, Helldivers 2, and Black Myth: Wukong.”
For makers of PC and console games, there’s one other concerning trend that emerges when you look at geographic data.
It turns out that new game seekers are not evenly distributed geographically, and older and wealthier markets like Europe and Japan tend to have the fewest new game seekers.
The interesting exception to the rule is the United States, the only western country outside of Latin America where over 25% of PC and console gamers regularly seek out new or trending games.
For the next phase of our investigation into Gen Z gaming habits, we wanted to zoom in a bit further on the US. And we specifically wondered about the gender gap mentioned above in the data about new game seekers.
We wondered: What other differences between male and female players might we find?
Investigating the Gender Gaming Gap
When looking at the gaming habits of Gen Z players, one theme that repeatedly pops up is that there are non-trivial differences between male and female players.3
According to Jure Grahek, Head of Strategic Initiatives at ZBD, of the Gen Z American players his team surveyed:
More males reported buying a gaming subscription in the last year (64% male vs. 46% female)
Males are also more likely to be heavy spenders, with 6% of males spending more than $100 per month on games (vs. only 2% of female players surveyed).
Males spend more time playing games per day—33% reported playing for 5+ hours per day, vs. only 19% of surveyed females.
YPulse on Time Spent Gaming
A recent YPulse survey of 1,500 Americans and Canadians aged 13-39 found that nearly all teens play video or mobile games and 91% of 13-17-year-olds play daily or weekly.
Per YPulse:
“One major insight we see about the time spent doing each of these things is that the amount of time young people are spending playing video games is rivaling the amount of time they're spending watching TV. In a recent media consumption survey we asked about this in a slightly different way, and found that among all young consumers 13-39-years-old, an average of 6.5 hours a week are spent playing video games or mobile games and an average of 9.4 hours a week is spent watching content on streaming services.”
—MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse
According to ZBD’s study, male and female gamers also increasingly favoring different social media platforms.
In a survey question about platforms where players “engage with influencers,” twice as many males mentioned Twitch (32% vs. 16% female) and Reddit (14% male vs. 7% female):
TikTok, on the other hand, skewed much more female (75% female vs. 50% male).
The same phenomenon appeared when ZBD asked players about the genres of games they usually play. When sliced by gender, gaps appear for certain genres like first-person shooters (64% male vs. 39% female) or casual mobile games (68% female vs. 48% male).
But these gaps aren’t as big as you might expect (39% is a lot!) and some genres (particularly RPGs, adventure games and party games) do seem to have much more balanced cross-gender appeal.
Other gaps in preferences between young men and women are apparent in the choice of platforms where gamers play, according to MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse:
“While the majority of both 13-39-year-old males and females play games on consoles, computer, and mobile,” Bliss says, “young males are far more likely to play on a console weekly (72% of males, 44% females) and a computer weekly (54% of males, 33% females).”
These differences of platform preferences even extend to different brands of consoles. Bliss says that in YPulse’s survey of young people who play games on a console, young males were more likely to say they game on a PlayStation (55% of males vs. 43% of females), while females were more likely to report playing on a Nintendo Switch (13% of male vs. 20% of females)
Takeaways
What do we make of these trends? A picture is beginning to emerge of the gaming habits of the zoomers. A few takeaways from us:
Zoomers differ from older generations in their willingness to try new games, but like all generational cohorts they gravitate toward the biggest live-service titles and franchises like Minecraft, Call of Duty, and Fortnite. (Roblox, which comes in at #7 for zoomers, appears to be more of a Gen Alpha phenomenon).
A certain segment of Gen Z gamers (skewed male and favoring PC and console) seems to be partly responsible for the phenomenon of “flavor of the month” games that pop-off with enormous spikes in sales and attention before quickly fading.
Though the differences in preferences between male and female players are meaningful, surprisingly large percentages of female players (at least of those who play an hour+ per day) are engaged with every genre, even those where they’re underrepresented, like FPS
However, the methods by which devs and marketers can reach male and female players seems to be highly divergent, with noticeably more female gamers on TikTok and stronger male presence on platforms like Twitch.
That’s it for this week. Want more pieces like this one, or have questions about game development that you’d like to see A16Z GAMES tackle?
Write in to us at games-content@a16z.com
🌴 LA Tech Week is a Wrap!
Thanks to everyone who joined us for LA Tech Week! Special shout out to AppsFlyer’s Brian Murphy, Mavan’s Matt Widdoes, Riot Games’s Cody Christie, and moderator Jen Donahoe (of Deconstructor of Fun fame) for joining our own Doug McCracken to chat about “Taking Your Game From Zero to One Million.”
Some more highlights:
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The YPulse Behavioral Report, (North America, May 2024)
Newzoo defines Gen Z as those born between 1995 and 2009 (currently aged 15 to 29).
In April of this year payments platform ZBD published a survey of 2,004 Gen Z gamers in the US aged 18-25 (birth years 1998 to 2005). The resulting report specifically only included responses from those who play video games for at least one hour every day, so it’s an interesting look at a more “hardcore” segment.
This is a fascinating deep dive into Gen Z’s gaming habits. It’s clear that while major franchises like Fortnite and Minecraft dominate, many zoomers are sticking to a select few titles, perhaps due to the growing role of live-service games that create a persistent, immersive experience. The notion that a significant portion of the Gen Z gaming community gravitates toward just one or two games speaks volumes about how content engagement has shifted where depth and community matter more than breadth. It’ll be interesting to see how this trend shapes not just game design but also the ways in which developers foster long-term player retention in the years to come. https://aking.io/free-online-games/
Hi there …. Do you have a discord community yet?