If you mean "Do I have scientific studies on hand specifically to prove to these things" evidence? No. I don't catalogue everything I see in life. But if you want evidence, just look at the poll results. I can go dig for them, though, as these are not uncommon sentiments that I am echoing. I am partly paraphrasing a section of Malcom Gladwells Outliers: The Story of Success, particularly the portion that goes over how 14 of the 75 wealthiest people were born between 1831 and 1840. The reason why is because in the 1870s there was massive economic restructuring in the United States, and everyone who was born before that period weren't capable of handling the paradigm shift. To make a comparison, I'm going to take Yu-gi-oh as an example. It is a card game that was popularized when 4kids translated and adopted over a related television show in 2001. The card game itself was released in 2002, following the success of the important cartoon during the Saturday Morning block. To want to play the game you had to have passing familiarity with the show, which would put you squarely in its young boys and teenager demographic. The exact range is unknown, but I'm going to estimate that it is between 8 and 16, as younger kids would have trouble understanding what is going on, and juniors in highschool were "too old for it" to garner interest. In 2002, there wasn't that much alternative media out there. We were in the Playstation 2 era of gaming and most of the internet looked like privately owned geocities pages. Having pieces of cardboard with pictures of dragons on them was still a "thing". But, from beyond that date, several things happened. In 2003, Call of Duty and similar games revolutionized the online gaming scene. In 2004 World of Warcraft hit, essentially creating its own market. In 2005, Youtube was launched.In 2007 the I-phone was dropped. The Saturday morning cartoon block vanished completely. Easily streamed shows meant that production companies no longer had absolute control over what cartoons to import. 4kids went belly up, and aside from a few dubs most people just stream whatever show they want to watch. Action cartoons and cartoons with long running plots lost popularity, replaced by short run episodic quips (I.E. Teen Titans -> Teen Titans GO!, Ben 10 -> Ben 10 2016, etc). Every single thing that was in place to make Yu-gi-oh a successful business venture is gone now. Either you were in the age range where you watched the show and became interested in the card game, or you weren't and you missed the boat. Of course there are going to be exceptions, such as parents who watched the show with their kids, or gaming store owners who got into it, or imports from older games. But the general trend is pretty obvious as a whole. If you look too hard at the exception, you'll miss the forest for the trees. Any tree in a forest is going to have its own tale, but there's still a forest all around it. The aging hobbies issue is not something that I see in one place. It is something I see in every place. In CCGs, Yu-gi-oh, Magic: The Gathering, Cardfight! Vanguard, all are suffering from the same issue of low sales due to an aging playerbase. Even the gaming juggernaut of WoW is facing a similar problem. There's even fears that the console gaming market might die off, though evidence for it is inconclusive due to wide market movements. Do you like comic books? Well, that medium is dying off, in spite of all the success that their IPs have in other departments. Contrary to popular opinion, it isn't just because Marvel's comic division was taken over by far-left extremists. When it comes to MMOs in general, there is some debate out there on what the normal values should be, since there is no true MMO market. Each game creates its own market. But, it is hard to debate the fact that numbers aren't nearly as high as they were in the past. These are all consumption hobbies that I am familiar with, as I am 1/8th couch potato by blood. But it hurts production hobbies, too. But are there as many domestic gardens? Seamstresses? Model makers? Bee Keepers? Mike Rowe talks about The Skills Gap a lot, referencing a change in values of western civilization away from tradesmithing and towards entertainment and academics. I don't have much personal experience on these things, as I am naturally averse to motion, but growing up I noticed a distinct lack of interest in any of these topics among my peers. Hard to imagine, but there was a time when people used to make clothes for fun. The concept is really simple to grasp overall. I'm surprised I am getting so much resistance to the notion. As much of a nerd I am, I can't help but have those tiny moments of clarity where I look down from above at all this and see how silly everything is. When I watched the Inhumans premier, there was a moment where I legit felt like a bad person for bothering to even care about the show. Everything in the Inhumans lore is so discordant and stupid that I had a "what the hell am I doing here?" moment while watching it. I'll have to disagree with C.S. Lewis here, and say that self-analysis is a critical part of maturation. Being unaware is a characteristic of youth, and not a good characteristic at that. A lot has changed in the last 10 years on the web as well. There's FB whose ultimate goal is to consume as much of its user's time as possible for top dollar ad serving. Then there's declining quality of Google search results to favor big brands that pay top dollar (pay AdWords, get a bonus free organic listing) instead of passionate indie owned websites. Lastly, Amazon who wants to control all of the worlds commerce, from distribution of physical and digital goods to manufacturing. In the end, consumers lose when there's large market consolidation.
Amazon is cheaper. They compromised quality for nickel and diming their customers. Not surprised.Didn't NC Soft do a similar thing with Wildstar? Not certain though.
