November 2025 is a month that many video game lovers have “celebrated” as the twentieth anniversary of Xbox 360. Pure nostalgiabecause beyond memory, November 2025 will be remembered by Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft as a black month. The reason? It is the worst November for console sales since, precisely, November 2005.
In the recent report from Circana we can see a figure very striking: 27%. That is how much spending by American consumers – the largest market for video games – has fallen during November of this year compared to November 2024. Another fact: with 1.6 million consoles sold that month, it is the worst November since 1995, the year of launch of PlayStation.
It is relevant because it was released a year ago PS5 Pro and this month of may nintendo switch 2but the high prices of both machines and video games, which have experienced a rise in recent months, have not been able to convince players. Not even on Black Friday.
And the key here may not be that thousands of video games are released every month or the price of the console itself. The key may be that the console war has ended and a very different one has begun: the attention war.
Console war? War of attention
At Xataka we have discussed the topic on more than one occasion. Our ability to focus is broken. in a task due to the enormous amount of stimuli to which we are subjected. Everything competes for our attention.
Matt Booty, one of the Xbox heavyweights, said A few months ago Xbox’s competition was not PlayStation. Neither does Nintendo. The competition was TikTok. It was not a mistake, since Satya Nadella, absolute boss of the American company, also stated that “the competition of video games is not other video games, but short format video.”
The interesting thing is that it is not an unreasonable statement. To Netflix, especially as a result of the final season of ‘Stranger Things’you are being accusing of producing empty series so that people have them in the background because they assume that they will be consuming short videos on their mobile phones while watching the series.
That’s why there are short dialogues and a long opening exposition at the beginning of the season so you can “forget” about having to follow anything else. We are in a moment in which we spend the day unfocused, without being able look at your phone every 15 minutes as a reflex act and where we have to look for strategies so that multitasking and division of attention does not affect us.
Matthew Bell, one of the most influential analysts of the video game market, already told it a few months ago in his book ‘The State of Video Gaming 2025‘. In your radiographypointed out how the video game industry no longer competes against itself, but against a tremendously fragmented digital entertainment ecosystem.
Our time is finite. If we take away the hours of work, rest, transportation and food, we have little time for the rest. In the United States, there are studies who do not agree on how much time an average user spends on TikTok. The data varies between 58 minutes and 95, but whatever it is, then there is YouTube, Instagram or Facebook.
This, in addition, is having cognitive consequences: have less attention span than a fish has. If in 2020 the average human attention span was twelve seconds, now it is eight. A fish pays attention for nine seconds, and you have to pay attention to a video game.
And the threat of TikTok? The AI
There are those who are catching this situation on the fly and that is why microdramas have appeared. At first, the fever of series with one-minute episodes occurred in Chinabut is climbing.
And it is logical that you think: if the competition for consoles is TikTok, who is TikTok’s competition? The answer is also easy: artificial intelligence.
Those minutes in which users They use ChatGPT as if it were their psychologista virtual friend or even a coupleare minutes that are not spent on TikTok. It is still something as accessible as opening an app, exactly the same as on TikTok, but perhaps waiting for that response from an AI that is characterized by being tremendously flattering is more comforting for our brain than the umpteenth quick video created with… AI –the slope-.
Because they are social networks, video platforms, consoles, artificial intelligence and even the metaverse – someday, if that -, the objective is the same: to keep us glued to the screen.
And we cannot attend to everything.
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