i hate game stop

My parents came to my house and said I have 300 games over what I should have. That doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that Game Stop lies about console sales. The

Internet says Wii U is dead, and Game Stop clerks says Wii U is increasing sales

and thier best month was August. I hope Game Stop goes out of business. They

lie, their used games are too expensive, and the Internet bandwidth caps prevent me

from downloading online over 5 gb). So of course I walked out without buying any videogame.

I love The Videogame Critic.The video game industry is maturing—fast. The average age
of a “gamer,” that is, someone who plays video games on a regular basis,
is now 37, according to the Entertainment Software Association, an
industry trade group. That’s up from last year, when the average came in
at around 35 years old.

Surprised? Don’t be. After all, these “greying gamers”
were the first generation to grow up with video games as children. As
they’ve aged, many apparently kept on playing, delving even deeper into
the gaming abyss through consoles, PCs, and now their mobile devices.

If you care to see this older, dare I say, more “refined” sort of gamer, then make your way out west this week to this
year’s E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, the gaming
industry’s biggest trade show. There you will see plenty of Gen X’ers
and Gen Y’ers (is that still a thing?) milling about, many sporting
unkempt beards and ironic t-shirts like it’s 2007. Apparently, shaving
and adhering to current fashion norms takes way too much time and
effort, time away from Assassin’s Creed 32, or some other “new”
iteration of a once popular gaming title.

But this older generation of gamers is both a blessing and
a curse for the industry. It is a blessing in that as they age, their
pockets get deeper, so they potentially have more money to spend on
their hobby (assuming they don’t get married and have kids, which,
unsurprisingly, many don’t). But it is also a curse, because the
industry seems stuck in a time warp.

Simply put, content makers, many of whom are greying
gamers themselves, have become lazy. They have failed to innovate on
both the hardware and content side of the business, alienating potential
young consumers while angering older gamers who crave something newer
than just another Call of Duty. Each new game “unveiled” this week in
Los Angeles will almost undoubtedly be a mashup of characters and scenes
derived from popular movie franchises that debuted in the late 1990s
and early 2000s, such as The Matrix, Starship Troopers, The Terminator,
Sailor Moon, and The Hobbit, with a dash of The Fast and the Furious
thrown in for good measure. It is getting old.

The result of all this nostalgic and creative laziness
is a shrinking market. Video game sales in the U.S. actually peaked in
2010, at $17 billion, and have fallen progressively ever since, hitting
just $15.4 billion in 2014, according to NPD Group. This is expected to
continue unless the industry finds a new life source, and fast.

To be sure, this drop-off isn’t just because younger
people don’t watch TV or because they are Snapchatting or whatever all
day on their mobile phones. They aren’t interested because the content
doesn’t speak to them. While mobile is the “fastest” growing segment of
the industry, it is inherently backwards looking given the technological
and ergonomic constraints of the market. Either the games have to be
terribly simple (and forgettable), like Candy Crush, or they have to be
stripped down (worse) versions of console games.

But the industry feels compelled to “capture” this market
nonetheless, diverting precious resources that would be better spent
advancing the core gaming market. For example, on Sunday evening,
Bethesda Game Studios, a major game developer, showed off its newest
iteration of its popular “Fallout” series, Fallout 4, but also revealed a
new Fallout mobile game, ostensibly to “capture” the yet unnamed
generation of kids today. Todd Howard, director of Bethesda Gaming, said
the mobile Fallout version was “inspired by games we love going back 30
years,” and that gamers will see inspirations from older retro games
like X-com, SimCity, and FTL, which are, “games we really really like.” I
think that says it all.

As the show rolls on this week, it would be nice to see
some real innovation in the core gaming product, as well as some fresh
content aimed at a younger subset of the population. Virtual reality
(VR) has been talked about for years, but we have yet to see it come to
market. Oculus now says its consumer VR product will be out by the first
quarter of next year, and Valve and HTC say their VR console will be
ready for this year’s holiday season.

If true, then the industry needs to start building content
for this new and potentially “game changing” platform as quickly as
possible. And no, that doesn’t mean shoehorning current games to just
simply “work” on a VR platform. It means building new games from the
ground up, specifically tailored for the virtual reality experience. If
the content fails to wow consumers, then they won’t pay hundreds of
dollars to acquire a VR system, which means VR will die a quick death,
just as it did in the 1990s.

So, given all that, what’s on tap for Monday at E3?
Microsoft kicks things off at noon (Eastern Time), followed by EA and
Ubisoft later in the day. Sony will have its flashy press conference
this evening around 8:30pm ET while Nintendo will have theirs tomorrow
at noon, which is actually official first day of the conference. Fortune will have people on the ground, so look out for news briefs throughout the day.