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The story
A thread ignited on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry board (“Geha”) after a video argued that “adults stop playing games because once you start earning real rewards for effort in real life, the rewards games offer start to feel pointless by comparison.” Pushback poured in, with posters citing other factors — limited time and stamina, busy work schedules — while others pointed out the unfairness of singling out gaming alone as a “waste of time.” Some posts went further still, citing articles showing Japan’s domestic game market is actually still growing rather than shrinking, questioning the video’s premise altogether — expanding the debate from “why do adults quit gaming” to whether they’re even quitting at all.
What people said
Basically "if you have time to play, invest it in yourself instead," right?
I stopped gaming more than 10 years after I started working.
Of course the people who notice that are the first to drop out — it's just the natural order of things.
Like, I'll pay you — just spare me the pointless events and the overtime.
Once you're an adult, time is more precious than the money you spend on gaming.
Well, the console-war trolls who own just one system and spend all day trash-talking the others will never get it.
Because they don't have jobs 🙄
my motivation to play quietly drains away.
Normal people don't go around calling others "poor" or "beggars" for fun.
If you can't put yourself in someone else's shoes without experiencing it firsthand yourself, that's a pretty serious lack of imagination.
Re: #79
I've got 100 million yen and I still trash-talk people.
Something the edgy "life's just a way to kill time anyway" middle-school-brain types will never get.
Today's games don't praise you — it's just a grindy slog.
Games made by people who themselves grew up on games are somehow incredibly painful to play.
becoming an adult means more obligations pile up and you have less time to focus on any one thing.
You realize:
games are just a tool for killing time.
Then it hits you:
reading a book or watching a movie gives you way better "taipa" (short for "time performance" — value gained per minute spent) than pouring dozens of hours into a game.
That has a game-like quality to it too — it's got its own fun factor.
So now we're comparing ourselves to pachinko?
So it's fine as long as it's "better than pachinko"?
Sounds like a race to the bottom.
Might as well throw train-spotters (a notoriously obsessive hobbyist group known for causing trouble) into the mix too.
Watching movies or sports is just as much a waste of time, but I've never once seen that get attacked with this kind of rhetoric.
Makes me suspect it's really just plain old snobbery.
Because the people bashing it don't know anything else besides gaming.
One factor is that games don't come with a built-in stopping point.
If you want, you can just keep doing the same thing endlessly until you're totally worn out.
https://www.famitsu.com/article/202608/83758
Console sales look set for a sharp drop starting this year, though.
Especially action games or sports games that demand split-second judgment and reflexes.
The video actually touches on this too —
games surprisingly force a lot of active decision-making on you.
That's why there's an argument that, for working adults, having to keep making choices even after work is exhausting.
But in retirement, that amount would probably be just right.
Though they probably end up in mobile gacha games rather than consoles — consoles are expensive.
Gacha spending ends up costing more than consoles anyway.
Unless you're playing mobile games free-to-play and fine with staying at the bottom tier, lol.
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
The source of this thread was a video (apparently narrated in the popular “Zundamon” voice-synth commentary style) arguing that people quit gaming because “reality becomes easier to earn rewards from,” and the thread’s reactions zeroed in on that single claim. The debate broke down into roughly two main points. First, pushback against the “rewards theory” itself, with many posters citing other factors instead — the finite nature of time, declining eyesight and stamina, and growing burdens from work and family. Second, questions about the asymmetry of singling out gaming alone as a “waste of time,” with posters noting that watching movies or sports follows the same structure yet rarely draws this kind of criticism. Alongside this, some posts cited published data showing Japan’s domestic game market continues to expand, casting doubt on the very premise that “adults are quitting games” — pushing the thread’s discussion beyond simply hunting for reasons and into questioning the premise itself. It’s worth noting that the video’s claims reflect one individual’s opinion and are not backed by any cited statistics.
※This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “The real reason adults stop gaming: once reality starts paying off, games start to feel pointless.”
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