U.S. spending on video game content, hardware and accessories fell 7% when compared to a year ago, to $5.9 billion. The decline was driven by a 24% drop in hardware spending and a 3% dip in content.

Translation: "We're no longer posting record profits each quarter and even though we still make enough money to not really care we're going to complain about it. BUY OUR SHIT YOU INGRATES!!"

This is a good example of why super broad statistics over short time frames are a really bad idea.

I can think of a million reasons as to why there might be more or less sales, to explain anything. As a result you can't really derive anything from this.

I mean for consoles, makes sense, Microsoft focuses on gamepass (so less physical is being bought), Sony 1st party studios basically released a single game this year (Spiderman 2), and nintendos year has (mostly) been quiet outside of TOTK due to it being the end of the switches lifetime, as id guess next year a new device will be announced.

For pc, it spiked heavily during covid because everyone was at home, so coming out of covid time period was guaranteed to have a drop in sales.

Not buying a PS5 because there was a shortage and now too expensive. Bought an older GPU and held off on updating CPU due to price.

Things need to normalise otherwise I'll just go back to books or touching grass