Roblox and Minecraft gamers are much less more likely to play conventional AAA video video games

The latest report from information agency Newzoo reveals that there’s little overlap between gamers of Roblox and Minecraft and gamers of extra conventional AAA hits.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at GDC Festival of Gaming, Newzoo director of consulting Ben Porter defined that fancy visuals have turn out to be much less essential. “I think there’s been a shift in the last 10 years,” he says, “where the idea of chasing graphics has kind of faded and now you see the most popular games on the planet are not the most graphically high-fidelity games.”

Roblox specifically has been on the forefront of this development. “We saw that its playtime grew around 50% year over year, which is huge. A lot of that was driven by experiences like Steal a Brainrot and Grow a Garden, which are very viral things.”

He continues: “The question is, what else are those people playing? What is the implication for the rest of the games industry? And when we look at that, we see that Roblox and Minecraft players are playing a lot of the other really big top ten live service games.”

Those video games embrace Fortnite (which has a 55% overlap with Roblox gamers and a 46% overlap with Minecraft gamers), GTAV (28% overlap with Roblox; 25% overlap with Minecraft), and Call of Duty (26% overlap with Roblox; 22% overlap with Minecraft).

But do Roblox and Minecraft gamers additionally play different titles other than the above? “There’s a theory that these folks then drop out and play single player experiences and then they go back to their live service experiences,” says Porter. “And to some extent that is true, but what we find is that Roblox players underindex in what a lot of the industry would consider very ‘traditionally good games’.”

“The way to interpret this is that someone who played Roblox is about 0.4 times as likely to play Monster Hunter Wilds compared to the average player – this is specifically for PlayStation and Xbox.”

Some of the console titles that Minecraft gamers are least more likely to play embrace video games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Borderlands 4, Ghost of Yōtei, NBA 2K26, and EA Sports Madden NFL 26. The checklist for Roblox gamers is comparable, together with Monster Hunter Wilds, Borderlands 4, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Ghost of Yōtei, Alan Wake 2, and Hogwarts Legacy.

All of this appears to point that Roblox and Minecraft gamers sit in their very own siloes, unlikely to float away to extra conventional AAA video games. The indisputable fact that these gamers are sometimes within the time-rich, cash-poor youthful demographic additionally helps to elucidate their lack of urge for food for getting comparatively costly AAA video games.

However, Newzoo did discover some overlap between Roblox and Minecraft gamers and different video games exterior the highest ten live-service titles. “We do see that sure experiences like Gang Beasts, Among Us, and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, folks taking part in Roblox overindex in these. They’re nonetheless a comparatively small element, however they do get interested in these video games, which look lots just like the kinds of experiences that you just may need inside Roblox itself.

“So as a developer, you can’t really change what the Roblox audience likes, but I think it is important to be aware of this pattern. Especially because these are oftentimes younger players, this is their first experience within gaming, and that might set preferences for years to come. So there’s question marks: how does the gaming audience evolve from here?”

That stays the massive query going through the video games business: will youthful gamers preserve the habits of their youth and follow free-to-play live-service titles and sandbox video games as they get older? Or will they “graduate” on to extra conventional AAA titles as they age?

If it is the previous, we’d see titles like Roblox and Minecraft turn out to be ever greater whereas the marketplace for conventional AAA titles shrinks away. But when chatting with GamesIndustry.biz final yr, former Sony Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden was satisfied the latter would be the case, as younger folks’s style matures with age. “As we all grow older, we all move towards different interests and different enthusiasms,” he stated.

The Newzoo report additionally predicted that PC will overtake console income by 2028, and that the market will see its “first notable expansion since the pandemic slowdown.”