It's become more and more strange to me that the gaming market isn't segmented by what they play. I know the article has a little segmentation in it, but it's very strange not to focus on it.
I'm in a small gaming clan which plays a (dated) first-person shooter, and our oldest player is in his late 50s. I also know a lot of older people who play mobile games, or online poker, or Wordle. The three groups behave in radically different ways, and trying to understand their consumption is pointless without further segmentation. If you target the mobile gamers with ads about gaming mice they're not going to buy them, our 50-something has approximately zero chance of clicking on an ad for Clash of Clans, and the Wordle players would mostly be insulted by ads for online poker.
Same sort of problem as a survey of "readers" has, where fiction and non-fiction are so different that overall stats are misleading.
My understanding is that the budget required to build a game perceived as "modern" is higher and higher each year, meaning that studios need to target a very large market to be profitable. This is for example why we don't see complex RTS and arena shooters anymore: their market is too small to pay for the investment. The 50+ years old video game market is tiny, and you'd need very different marketing (compared to what works with the usual 15-25yo segment) to target it.
It is true that lots of indie games find success with smaller budgets. But I suspect that lots of indie developers are not 50+ years old. Game development is mostly a craft, and unsurprisingly indie game developers prefer to work on projects similar to what they themselves enjoy.
I'm not sure the market is as tiny as you think. 4 out of 10 adults over 50 play on average 12 hours per week. By reading the article it seems that many are casual gamers who use games to relax, and women are the most frequent players. I suspect you will also find a large portion of 30+ gamers playing the same type of games.
To me it seems like a large enough market to target. Candy crush has nailed the target group (Women 35+) and is making lots of money.
there still are plenty of RTS, and probably also arena shooters, depending on what your requirements for inclusion are, coming out. maybe you don't see them because they are drowned out by other stuff, but there still are. (for instance, AOE4 is recent, unreal tournament is soon releasing I think)
I’ve been in similar gaming groups that had plenty of people in their 50s. While they would center around an older game like, say, Battlefield 4, the members played newer shooters as well. Further, older players probably have more disposable income for in-game purchases, even in a game highly popular with younger players.
It's become more and more strange to me that the gaming market
isn't segmented by what they play.
There a lot more precise and intricate segmentation in the actual industry. Advertising to gain new players (known in mobile as "user acquisition") is it's own profession and a lot of money and resources are spent on improving it.
Planetside 2 (2012), and formerly the original Planetside (2003). They're both heavily community-oriented games. 2 has gameplay somewhat similar to Battlefield.
Edit: To expand on what I mean by community-oriented, here's a genealogy of the different outfits (equivalent of a clan/guild) on one of the Planetside 2 servers: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/887173952080863253/91.... Once you're used to the game mechanics you slowly get drawn into the metagame of complementary or conflicting personalities, outfit history, schisms, cooperation, drama, competitive play, leadership, and so on.
I have fond memories of running Platoons in Planetside 2. The semi persistent world dynamics, combined with squads and then squads being able to firm platoons, and the map marker system. All of it felt very unique and polished, and not something I've seen replicated elsewhere. I was sad when it started to die out.
Not the parent, but I still regularly (let's say once a month) Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (2003) [1] with a number of friends, although it has now a community that keeps developing/maintaining the open source code [2], so I'm not sure it if counts as dated
Yep! I play on the FA and Team Muppet servers, and at peak times during the day the server will be almost full (60 players).
But, that's kinda it, I doubt there are ever more than 1k people online at a time. But those same people have millions of XP (I actually have a PR open on the client ATM to abbreviate the XP in the scoreboard, which I think we finally need after 20 years lol)
If you play, make sure you use the etlegacy client, it is backwards compatible with many fixes/improvements.
This isn’t surprising, considering 50+ gamers came of age at the start of home gaming boom. They grew up on video games. Either on Atari, Calico , Intellivision , Commodore or later NES. Also arcades. 50+ year olds are probably at a point in their lives where they also have a bit more disposable income than later generations. Although, in my case at 51,despite having the disposable income - I just don't have the time to invest in a game that requires lot of grinding away. Especially with many of the big-budget popular MMORPGs that require lot of play hours.
Yeah, anyone shocked by this is confused by the nature of both humans and linear time.
This is why it's impossible for me to take seriously anyone who claims that a given medium is only for kids. Kids grow up, and adults who love a medium move it forwards into something adults can take seriously, thereby proving that anxiety over whether a medium is "too young" for you is fundamentally adolescent, and rooted in anxiety over your own maturity. Certain works can be too immature to satisfy an adult, but a given medium is infinitely malleable and can tell stories at any level.
Of course, this relates to the similarly pointless diatribes that refuse to distinguish between a medium, a genre, and a level of quality, and therefore insist that a given medium is only for works in a given genre with a given (assumed low) level of quality. I don't have time for a single second of that nonsense.
I think there really was a time when gaming seemed like a fundamentally limited medium that was really mostly for children. Non-bankswitched 2600 games, for example, are not really a medium that can be used for very much interesting storytelling, just not-very-repeatable (unless you're 8 years old) "flashing colors" experiences. I agree that it wasn't long after the 2600 era that this changed dramatically though. In the US, it realistically was the success of the Commodore 64 that changed this. 64k of memory and much more capable video hardware completely changed the game. Similar machines led this revolution in Europe.
Actually, even before the 2600 there were complex mainframe and Unix games (for the very limited audiences that had access to these machines), but my point is that I can't really blame somebody in, say, 1978 seeing an Atari cartridge game and thinking it would never be something adults were interested in.
BTW, do you know the 1983 book "Pilgrim in the Microworld"[0]? It's a truly insightful and deep critique of Breakout and playing video-games in general, from the era (and machine!) you're speaking of. I can only recommend it!
Also not surprised. I was impressed with how many older people played World of Warcraft just for the social life. Can't get 3 folks over for bridge? No problem, fire up the computer.
Put a bunch of older guys in the world of Horizon Zero Dawn to go out machine hunting, I'm sure they would be all for it. Add a crafting/building component so that groups could build villages and what not (minecraft meets HZD meets Counter Strike) kind of environments, it would be much more fun that sitting around watching the TV right?
And I am an avid Path Of Exile player with Civilization thrown in between leagues and play Splendor with my brother over the Internet practically daily.
There are many of us that grew up in the 80s / early 90s who still play games today.
I think the view of gamers are 20 years behind reality and uses outdated stereotypes. Just look at the comment in another thread that assumes 50-year olds play bridge, like being old means you are stuck in a 90s cliche of what older people do.
Why wouldn't we continue playing games? There may be a period in life where work and/or kids takes more of your gaming time, but once you get older you have more personal time that can be spent on gaming.
The average US gamer is currently 35 years old and increasing. 46% of American gamers are female.
Kinda depends on whether the "gamer" means "someone who occasionally plays games or "self identified as member of specific gamer culture". The word gamer can mean both.
Full disclosure: I am a woman who strongly refuses the title "gamer" and occasionally playing some games. For me, it means specific culture I decided I don't want to be member of.
I was thinking the same thing. I just turned 50, learned to code on a ZX Spectrum, and regularly play Space Station 14, Dwarf Fortress and Elite Dangerous among others.
I got the Ti-99/4A as a bday gift in '83.Then within a few months Texas Instruments discontinued it. I still have it in a box somewhere. Been kicking around some ideas. Maybe remove the mainboard and put in a RaspberryPi 4 or some other SBC. Then wire it up to the keyboard. Someone was selling a board on tindie that made it possible to connect the keyboard ribbon cable to USB. But sadly its no longer being sold.
I don’t know if you remember, but before the cartridge consoles, we had a shit ton of black and white PONG consoles… all with the same 5 games. I think they all used the same chip but changed the packaging and controllers.
Yeah, I remember those single game machines as well. But like most kids , including me the time , the first exposure to a home console was when the Atari 2600 was released. It seemed liked everyone had one. Of course there were few kids that had the ColecoVision or Intellivsion box (with its weird funky controller)
Per the image at the head of the article, they’re still not yet a growing force in stock photography. Which seems a reasonable explanation as to why it’s so incredibly difficult to get Midjourney et al to generate realistic images of elderly people playing video games. I spent nearly a month’s worth of credit trying to get it to show older people playing Dance Dance Revolution.
Also, my grandmother who recently passed away at 96, spent hours and hours playing games like Candy Crush. She often passed out in front of her computer at 2am. Not that ‘casual’ imo. My mom does the same, feels like some kind of sick payback for being addicted to NES as a kid.
It's so weird when that happens. During the Wii boom my parents visited for Christmas. I got them into Mario Kart and on Christmas Eve I cooked for the family. When done, I had to repeatedly encourage my parents to please stop playing Mario Kart and join my wife and me for Christmas dinner before the food gets cold. Very strange to experience this in reverse, as I still had vivid memories of my parents trying to pull me away from Link's Awakening on my GameBoy many Christmases earlier.
I didn't get tennis elbow but I did overdo it a bit on a couple of Wii tennis games for a time. I haven't used my Wii in ages but would love a version of some of the Wii sports with more modern technology on a current console.
After a month of heavy MidJourney use, I feel like MJ really needs a conversation mode more than anything. I can get images that are 80% of what I want, or 90%, but that final 10% can take so many rerolls. It's like crafting legendary loot in an RPG and hoping for best-in-slot stats. The grind takes exponentially more time the closer you get to what you want.
So many of my favorite image creations could be fixed simply by being able to say "hey try redrawing the hand with 4 visible fingers this time" or "turn that frown upside down".
I asked in their support forums about this and a moderator (?) glibly told me "MJ is not Photoshop". Ok, and? Imagine if GPT-4 only allowed one-shot prompts and that is kinda what MJ feels like.
I expect we will get there soon, MJ needs a conversation mode soon or they will be beaten in the market by someone who does. I feel foolish for buying an annual subscription to MJ if they do not realize this... hopefully they're working on it.
"Send to img2img" seems to be the closest thing to a conversation mode in SD.
Once I get something somewhat close to what I want I send it to img2img mode that accepts both an image and a prompt as inputs and refine it further from there.
Video slot machine are HUGE in senior centers. I'm still shocked at how many people actually play digital slot machines as the odds of winning posted on the machine are literally the odds of winning.
I'm a 50+ gamer and I could care less about refresh rates, any first-person shooters (I guess that's two FPS I don't care about!), photorealism, and dance/emotes. Stanley Parable was probably the last time I was blown away by a game. I'm glad to see more indie titles on Steam, but it is hard to sort through the chaff.
I'm another 50+ gamer - I tend to like MMOrpgs but I'm not a fan of PVP..I prefer a nice story based setup. I also like lots of 'leisure' activities like crafting, hobbies, fishing, collections, housing and cosmetics (I find them all to be good to relax/chill or kill time with). I can't really handle the current 'pixel-art' craze - I waited to long for stuff to progress beyond that. But I've found Lord of the Rings Online to have a really good story, tons of stuff to do, and huge zones to explore. At 16 years old, the graphics are not exactly 'cutting edge' - but they're not bad, and they are overhauling them. ESO wasn't bad either. Harvesting in FF:ARR was an RSI inducing click fest but it was really pretty and I think it has housing now. ArcheAge was way too much like a second job...
WoW floored me, it was what I had always wanted in a game since first playing Ultima (I). The grind and the silliness finally killed it tho (plus trying to wrangle time to play after putting the kids to bed, I got very little sleep for 2 years). Funny you mention LotR online, as my guild lost a number of players to it when it first came out. Didn't know it was still alive and kicking! I kinda lament missing Eve Online, that also sounded fun.
EDIT. Mac support deprecated on LotR. :( And I only use my PC through Remote Desktop... maybe i'll give it a whirl anyways....
Oddly enough - Wow and Runescape are like the only 2 we didn't play...WoW's art style just never appealed. But we played SWG/SWTOR, EQ/EQ2 (lots of EQ2 - one of our favorites), Darkfall, FF:ARR, ESO, Ryzom, DDO, CoH, New World, Aion, Riders of Icaraus, Project Gorgon ( Very unique though a bit rough)
Now we're waiting on Ashes of Creation, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.
We just end up going back to LoTro a lot because its very casual friendly, the story/quest lines are awesome, its HUGE! (one of the largest maps second only to WoW and procedurally generated IIRC). Level cap is 140 now, so lots of stuff to do and see without having to 'end game grind'..Oh! and PVP in LoTro is called "monster play" - its literall the "freeps vs the creeps" - you can play as one of the "free peoples" (human,elf, etc) or as a "monster" - giant spider, wolf, orc, etc. You 'monster' characters actually have their own progression and skills and can be leveled like your 'regular' characters.
Anyway - I hope you can get it working! If it helps, it runs under proton/Steam on Linux too!
> I kinda lament missing Eve Online, that also sounded fun.
EVE Online is still alive. You could even play for free (alpha character), till you know if you would like to continue and hit the alpha characters' restrictions. But please be aware that EVE (well, still) does not have a learning curve but a learning cliff! ;)
Photorealism is definitely something that I feel is way over-targeted. It has never been something that makes or breaks a game for me. Even worse, games that try to sell themselves on photorealism tend to be a negative sign of the gameplay. I much prefer any other cohesive artistic style. I don't think any of my favorite (/most played) games have a style of realism: (Modded) Minecraft, Factorio, Civilization V/IV, Slay the Spire, Stellaris, Terraria, Rocket League, (Old School) Runescape, and RimWorld.
> Photorealism is definitely something that I feel is way over-targeted. It has never been something that makes or breaks a game for me.
It's bugged me for years that so many people don't see this. Photorealistic Candy Land is still just playing Candy Land, but so many people are driven by photorealism and eat it up.
It depends a lot on what sort of game it is I think. If the game relies on triggering human environmental instincts to be enjoyable, like forest-feeling, or fire-feeling, or bird-feeling, etc, then more photorealism seems helpful, if not all-important. If it's mostly about something else then not really helpful.
Ikr. So hard to filter thru the trash. I find a nice guided semi-open world game is my jam. Disco Elysium. Last of us. Uncharted series. I do enjoy some of the tight metroidvanias as well. Dead cells. Ori. Etc... Happy hunting!
The woman who sold me my last phone was probably in her early 20s, and she joined AARP for the discounts on her phone plan.
Off topic: the old farts in the picture hold the controller like old farts. The default way for people my age to pick up a Playstation or Xbox controller is to have your trigger fingers nowhere near the R1, L1 buttons....
I feel like almost no one knows this. It would be fun to join, get some AARP swag to display at work and then casually talk up your anti aging regimen to everyone.
I like FPS depending on the style and gameplay. Frantic MMO FPS such as CoD don't have any appeal to me, but as I said before, I liked Quake 4, and since then I played a number of FPS, most of them purchased from GOG: Crysis, Far Cry 1 and 2 (truly excellent game in many respects), Doom 3, Immortal Redneck, F.E.A.R. (another masterpiece)... What I didn't like was the Half-Life series, even though I can easily see how foundational they were for the genre. Too much puzzle solving.
Now I mostly play action RPGs, I'm currently playing Dragon Age: Inquisition. Nice game, although there are various aspects in which I am less than impressed.
Parent is right, the least thing I worry about are fps above 24, refresh rates, and insane difficulty levels. I play most games on Normal or Easy difficulties.
If you liked The Stanley Parable, the creator of the game made a sort of meta game about the development process called The Beginner's Guide. It's not in the same league, but it's an interesting experience.
Stanley Parable was pretty awesome in it's simplicity. Right there with you when it comes to high tech fancy graphics and animations and over the top storytelling instead of adding the equivalent manhours to gameplay.
In my experience MMO's such as WoW have a very large older playerbase.
I can think of 4 reasons:
1. This game has been around for a long time and the players that stuck with it aged with it.
2. It was designed for an much worse Internet and as such more tolerant of lag and packet loss, resulting in a playstyle less dependent on 18yo reflexes.
3. Size and complexity. A wilingness to engage in systems that require time investment and experience often outside of the game is less skewed towards instant gratification that seems to have generational bias. Other examples of also older age skewed games in this respect are Eve and PoE.
4. Cost is often mentioned, but I think this is a minor factor as many other games that skew younger cost about as much to play (season passes) or substantially more (mobile rpg's). The cost presentation (montly subscription) does feel decidedly eldery biased.
5. Nobody starts playing it in 2023. Dated design, inaccessible, janky, new player interest/engagement is near-zero. It keeps going based on retaining old players.
But even after almost 20 years, there's never been a real 'WoW beater', an MMO with comparable 'game feel', decent endgame PvE content, and a very customisable UI.
Hmm, but 50+ year olds would have been 30+ when it released, and so way too busy with life to suffer through the boring mandatory leveling up to the end of the game, where (I hear), the "real" game starts ?
I’m 39, and I picked up War Thunder again — from scratch - last November. I generally play for about four hours per day, after my wife and kids are asleep.
I'm not 50+, but I'm nearly 35. The only new games that I've managed to play through in the last 10 years are Super Mario Odyssey, BotW, GTA V, Diablo 3, and Mario Kart 8.
Most games lose me within the first 10 minutes. I don't know why but any game that tries to be "cinematic" or has complex controls just loses me immediately. I tried the Witcher but I just couldn't sit through all that dialog.
I understand that people want their games to be cinematic, but there should be a market for games where I can just jump in, have 30 minutes of fun by myself, and log off. I don't want to be immersed in another world. I don't want storytelling.
Yeah, I'm 38. I don't care about story, dialogs, whatever. I only care about game feeling and mechanics. If there are cutscenes I can't cancel, I'm out in a blink. Hence, I usually play competitive online games (currently a lot of Wild Rift), because they don't come with all that baggage.
A few good single-player games I played that have the story unfold in the background while you play:
- Hotline Miami (fast action, only few cutscenes, nice retro style)
- Dysmantle (story unfolds mostly through objects in the world)
- Raft (survival game, story is completely told through objects in the game)
- Valheim (almost no cut-scenes, but gets a bit repetitive after a while)
> I only care about game feeling and mechanics. If there are cutscenes I can't cancel, I'm out in a blink. Hence, I usually play competitive online games (currently a lot of Wild Rift), because they don't come with all that baggage.
I'm in a similar boat but I am 40.
My goto since about 6 to 7 years are roguelikes and fighting games. Those are very accommodating for gameplay-focused games that can be played in short bursts and they are very enjoyable for me at least.
I would care about a story - if they were not so stupid and time wasting. Stories in books and tv series matter to me. But, video game stories are just badly written. When they try to make characters, they end full of false sentimentalism, when they dont try it they end up wooden.
> I don't know why but any game that [...] has complex controls just loses me immediately
For me, the cutoff point is any game that requires combinations of button presses. The Xbox controller already has a crazy number of buttons. Any game that requires me to e.g. press the left stick down while simultaneously pressing the shoulder button is just an instant no. I remember abandoning the latest Doom game for this reason - it was just too much.
> there should be a market for games where I can just jump in, have 30 minutes of fun by myself, and log off
I've been playing Spelunky 2 for most of the last year for precisely this reason. Randomly generated levels, runs that last less than 15 minutes (sometimes seconds!) and gameplay that's simple to pick up but which has considerable depth when you get into it.
There is no way I could finish GTA, BoTW, or Diablo. I’m 40, I have a career. I have plenty of items to collect to upgrade stuff in my real life, plenty of menus too. I’m OK with complicated controls if they are revealed slowly. But there is an amazing amount of busy work in games these days. I stick to Rocket League and Overwatch and forego the skins and other tedium.
Diablo 3 is a very streamlined game... (perhaps too much ?)
Also, I find this ridiculous and a symptom of bad pacing, but most "competitive" people seem to prefer to skip it entirely : takes only a few minutes with the help of a high level player.
EDIT : as an example, the current «season» (where you restart the whole accumulation game from scratch across all season characters) added an «altar» where you can sacrifice random items to get season-wide character boosts. I though I was going crazy not finding the altar at the described & screenshotted location... it's because it's NOT available in story mode – only in the adventure-(the whole world starts open to you)-mode ! Nobody even thought to point that out : not in the (quite long) official season description, not in the guides that players made !!
OK maybe I need to try it again. I bought it on release ages ago and as I recall, it’s one of these many games where you go around picking up collectibles so you can have the pleasure of dealing with upgrade menus. I felt the same way about Witcher and so many other games.
It's a feature aimed at seasoned and returning players, this category does not play in story mode; story mode is aimed at people just starting the game. The majority of people playing the seasonal mode will play in adventure mode.
I am a returning player – from long enough ago that I am actually interested in replaying the story... and I think that I prefer the early game the most (when it's less chaotic), might or might not be related to me enjoying and completing the D3 beta with all the (then available) characters, which ended at lvl 12 and the Skeleton King ?
Knowing my own gaming habits I chose a non-gaming laptop with an iGPU over a more expensive gaming branded one with a mobile gpu variant.
I don't need a lot of graphical grunt to play Factorio, Rimworld, Vintage Story, Battletech, or the like. A lot of AAA games just don't appeal to me any more.
You might want to look into indie games. They tend to focus on simple controls and interesting, more experimental, mechanics.
If you like puzzles, you might like Patrick's Parabox (sic), Baba is You. If you like strategy games, try Into the Breach. Mini Metro and Mini Motorways give you a hyper-minimalistic take on the city-building genre. All of these are eminently playable in half-hour slices.
If you're willing to have your mind changed about storytelling, try Return of the Obra Dinn or Hades, or maybe Subnautica.
My favourite game of the last 10 years was Ori, but every time I have a free afternoon to kill I have to start again. Because I forget everything in the half year I was absent and that game builds the skill you need to play the game... I'm at loss every time I sit down.
So my current favourite games are 2-4 hour long that tells a good story. Eg Journey, tale of two brothers, slay the princess, Stanley's parable...
You're basically me, except I'm a year younger and you need to switch out GTA 5 and Diablo with the Hitman trilogy. I feel exactly the same way as you do about gaming.
Another 50 year old here. Counting down the days to Zelda Tears Of The Kingdom comes out, playing Horizon Burning Shores in the meantime, having just finished Fallout 4, Witcher 3, and Last Of Us 2 before that.
I tend to prefer games with story (and like puzzles so I guess I fit that oldie category), but play Mario Kart, Just Dance etc. regularly with one of my children, and I still play around creating retro 8-bit style arcade and adventure games too.
I find gaming and coding to be a way to unwind, my other half works late sometimes and I prefer it to being stuck in front of a television, but I'll take social time over it anytime. Somehow I still find time for reading and working on writing a new novel too.
50 here too. TOTK is the first game I've preordered in at least a decade, which is surprising since BOTW was the first/only Zelda game I ever played. Big open-world games that I can sink my teeth into for a month or two seems to be my favorite genre nowadays.
I'm almost 50 (and I played a lot of quake 1,2,3 back in the day) but I don't do FPS anymore. Physically I probably overdid it in my youth as now I have some numbness in both index fingers. I also can't hold down the right mouse button constantly as some MMOs require to pivot the camera (WoW being a prominent example, unless they changed it, though there used to be an addon that would do it, anyway I don't play WoW because of the sub.)
I don't like to put too much time into gaming these days, I have bursts but then take many months off. OTOH its better than reading the news or pointless or rage-inducing comments on social media, or even here at times. Since I can control the gaming experience I can make it pretty much autopilot so I don't have to worry about blood pressure spikes.
For you or anyone else that has numbness in the hands, a neck x-ray could be enlightening. As we hunch a lot we start to deform the cervical spine into pinching the nerves that run all the way down our arms into our hands. Problems in the neck area often manifest as symptoms anywhere in the hands, arms, and shoulders. Treatment varies, but I personally find a cervical dennerroll quite helpful.
Two severe pinches on the cervical spine here. Always start with a physical exam and let the doctor order the appropriate imaging. X-rays will not likely reveal anything going on with the spinal cord itself, that is in the realm of MRI or CT. A good neurosurgeon will know what to order.
I also have problems with games where you have to hold the mouse buttons down extended periods. But there is help to be had, especially if you have problems working [1], but also in general [2]. It's usually a few meetings where you get to do some movement while they feel your joints and then you get some exercises strengthening muscles or stretching sinews. Picking up archery might be good for your shoulders and posture too :-)
> the No. 1 gaming device for those 50-plus is still the smartphone, with 84% identifying it as their gaming device of choice and three in ten (30%) exclusively using their smartphones for gaming.
Not to be a downer but I wouldn't exactly count playing solitare or Candy Crush (or other gambling-adjacent games) as the same as how most gamers would use the phrase, which is generally about PC and console gaming.
Agreed. Based on the headline, I was expecting more of a "gamer" gamer demographic--those that identify as gamers. But when I got to the breakdown of game categories, it was basically all digital board games and puzzle games.
Games: yes
Gamers: not the type of gamers that would self-identify as one
Not trying to be disparaging, but I just was expecting something else from the headline.
"These days, isn't the average gamer a middle aged woman playing Candy Crush ?" is a favorite phrase of mine when I feel that some people are taking the conversation in a direction that is way too identitarian / cliché.
The issue here is whether gamer means "people who play games" or whether it means "specific self selected group".
Or rather, the question is, why does the opinion of these PC and console gaming matter here? The topic is very clearly older people who play games and market. Of course I do not want to be associated with "gamers" as a cultural group, thank you very much. But, that does not mean it should be impossible to discuss actual smart phone games I used to like or still like.
I know that gamers feel offended every time games I like get discuss without it being pointed out how inferior those games are. Which is one of reasons why I do not want to be associated with that cultural group. But that does not mean everyone needs to constantly tip toe arounds the topic and it should be freaking possible to use that word in general sense.
I think you're a bit out of touch with the mobile gaming landscape. Even 3D mobile games are quite prevalent now (e.g., games that are technically better than the N64 or PS2/3 depending on the phone, games that are comparable to PC/console games at low graphical settings).
I'm 52. I got back to gaming in 2020, just as I turned 50. I always wanted to play Quake 4, so I created an account in GOG and purchased it. I keep gaming till today.
My father turns 74 this year. He still will very proudly 100% a Legend of Zelda title without looking up an FAQ.
The whole reason I play video games is because my parents did. Some of my earliest memories was being crammed on the couch with my parents and sister, trying to wrap my head around Missile Command on an Atari VCS (2600) before the age of three. When we got an NES, the common thing was after we were put to bed, we'd hear the screeching of tires in R.C. Pro-AM. Or the music from Ice Climber. Or the frantic quacking of Duck Hunt.
Many years ago I gave my folks a Nintendo DSi XL for the holidays, with a bunch of games. When I went back for Mother's Day, I noticed the DSi XL was blue instead of white... because they bought a second (blue) one so they could both be playing games at the same time.
Dad plays a lot more on his iPad nowadays given his vision, but things like Chris Sawyer's top-notch iOS port of Roller Coaster Tycoon. He'll AirPlay it to the TV so him and mom can collaborate, or to show houseguests his parks. Or he plays Firaxis's great ports of the modern X-COMs. Mom likes Stardew Valley quite a bit, though still breaks out the Professor Layton series on the DS.
I think my parents realized when they were adults (late 20s, early 30s) is that games had staying power and were potentially evergreen entertainment. They could see it was more than a fad, especially when N years later their kids are playing with the same things (plus Lego) all the time, and weren’t asking for the new whatever toy.
Games get old, but the good ones hold up. Some of my favorite games from 35+ years ago still hold up extraordinarily well. It’s rare that you’ll watch a single movie hundreds of times, but there’s games where you easily can. Certainly not all, but a good chunk of them.
My folks put them down because of real life and because their son could demolish them in anything competitive (heck, I did speedrunning for a bit at some of the highest levels), but when you give them some top quality games and they have the time, they remembered the value pretty quick. As they’re moving into a very fixed income, they see the value for money they get from them.
Granted, they lucked out that one of their kids keeps a pulse on what’s good for all audiences. I don’t think my mom would’ve stumbled onto Baba Is You if I didn’t gift it to her. Dad would’ve never found his ideal digital train set (I now have my father’s trains) in OpenTTD if I didn’t point him in that direction.
I’m 61, and play a fair bit. Usually, it’s when I need a break from coding.
However, it’s definitely a “side gig,” for me. I don’t have a console, or a PC gaming rig. I’m also not into MP gaming. I don’t like being fragged by a 15-year-old kid, yelling physically impossible suggestions at me.
Just my Mac, and my iPad, with a couple of rather old games.
Good, maybe games will start doing a better job with font-scaling. Steam's awful UI would be one place to start. (Yes, it scales on the web, but not in their steam app unless you go to a lot of trouble.)
It was a more reasonable limitation 20+ years ago.
I grew up with video games and believed it would be a young people’s thing forever.
But now when I talk to young people, many of them don’t play or even know many games, and would rather just watch Netflix or YouTube.
However friends of my own age still play games.
So maybe video games isn’t actually a thing for young people, but simply a thing for people who were born in the 80-90s.
Just like rock’n’roll music. We used to think it was evergreen music for teens… But overtime realized it was simply for people born in the 40s-50s. And now it’s an old people’s thing.
Who would have ever expected the entertainment is something people of all ages enjoy, right? The media still has this sense of breathless amazement on the topic that is hard to understand.
Calling it now: we are going to see more and more accessibility features and difficulty adjusters in games going forward. Not only are the players getting older, but so are the developers who are passionate about making games. From a marketing perspective, relatively simple code changes open up extra markets who are already primed to buy by a lived history of growing up gamers.
I'll be damned if my nursing home days are going to be spent without a controller in my hand making my way through the Steam backlog.
I have to wonder what sort of interestingly weird stuff this is going to do to the statistics as this cohort continues to age, since this will likely displace a lot of 'sitting around watching TV' behavior (even if it's just 'sitting around playing video games' instead). It feels like it will be a comparatively huge boost to mental engagement in old age.
It will be interesting. Discretionary funds being spent on virtual hats, instead of 'granny bait' catalogs. eBooks instead of physical books (bigger text for aging eyes!). Subscription services instead of vinyl records and VHS tapes. More interesting is if this will hit the property market, as will less physical stuff you need less space. My parents had to have a big house for all their stuff. I recently retired and and most of my stuff is in boxes in a shed awaiting sorting and donation to charity, the physical books I will never read, the DVDs I will never watch, the CDs I will never play, the obsolete electronics.
Only if you insist on buying the latest generation. It matters little to the 50+, who have enough life experience to, in general, not be the people who fall into the trap of buying the latest and greatest. To participate in gaming at the 'high end', you need a newish Playstation or XBox, or PC equivalent. Anything beyond that is an indulgence, and competing with lots of things for our discretionary spending. Gaming today is incredibly cheap compared to hobbies in the 80s. To those of us who remember when those primitive game consoles and TVs cost hundreds of 80s dollars and computers cost thousands of 80s dollars, the cost of the latest gen video cards seems rational, but common sense and frugality that comes with retirement planning means we don't buy them unless there is spare cash to burn.
This is me though I was never really a gamer growing up. As a child I loved playing Adventure on my friend's Atari 3600 but never had a game console of my own until recently (I bought an Xbox). Now I play, of all things, Fortnite (mainly because it was free to try out, lol) and I'm not terrible... probably pretty good for my age group (absolutely slower than the kids, though). As a programmer I am still fairly mentally agile but this game feels like it helps. Doesn't hurt that our office has a Playstation and I can, on occasion, play there much to the surprise of some younger folks.
Huh, yeah? Did anyone think the flood of remakes and remasters cash-grabs was a work of love to elevate the original IPs? They're tailored to that part of the market: nostalgic grown-ups with disposable income.
I genuinely think we’re just at the beginning of the era of remakes and remasters for games.
There’s clearly a massive market for stuff like the FF7 / RE4 remakes — not just graphical updates, but total overhauls of beloved classics with modern game design.
People will burn out eventually. But if I could play, I dunno, HL2 built in Unreal Engine with a modern team? I’d drop $60 in a heartbeat.
>With staying sharp in mind, the top genres are consistently puzzle and logic games at 73%, followed by card and tile games (69%), word games (58%), brain games (37%), trivia and traditional board games (32%), and gambling, casino, or poker games (31%).
This sounds about right to me. I sell retro games, and we very rarely get customers in the 50+ age bracket (although there are plenty of ~40 year-olds who grew up in the NES era).
Half the oldies I know can't get enough of Words with Friends, Spider Solitaire and those weird mobile puzzle games from the Facebook ads, though.
Not 50+. I spent my whole teenage life sitting at the back and yelling instructions to my brothers playing game. I didn't get into gaming because I honestly couldn't figure out the dual control of movement and camera angles. And most games doesn't give you the immediate dopamine hit. You have to grind for a while to get that dopamine hit.
So, think of chess or any board game. The domain movement is pretty much one dimensional and the dopamine hits (small wins) even tough small but frequent. The rules of the world are limited and there is limited lore.
Maybe when we say "gaming" we envision grand action packed games but there are games that are successful because of their absolute simplicity. And hence we have games like candy crush being so popular. Something that replicates the experience of board games while giving you the convinience to get started to without requiring snappy real time mental effort. You keep playing because of a constant and frequent small wins that sometimes result in a big win.
Now that I am writong this I am not thinking of chess anymore. This experience replicates gambling. So somewhere between gambling and gaming there lies beautiful concept of a gaming framework that would be perfect for older people.
Ah yeah – when first introducing my mother to a first person (non-shooter) game, I was very surprised just how much trouble she had at moving around with WASD and looking around with the mouse at the same time !
Spending $49 within a six-month time frame? Seems like not much, but might not be far off the spend of younger gamers, depending on how you define a "gamer".
Cool! I'm in my late 40s and it feels like I'm only more into gaming now. In the 80s gaming was pretty boring, games with low graphics, lie complexity and no story.
These days they're almost interactive movies and I love VR in particular. It's just so amazing.
I still see a lot of judgement from more boring people my age though. I mainly hang out with makerspace people and they understand and sometimes even work in the gaming industry. But my old boss used to roll her eyes at us when we were talking about gaming. She was this ultra ambitious pantsuit type though, big family etc. Those people tend to just not understand though they'll happily binge Netflix.
"The study found that 45% of people 50-plus are gamers."
This made me doubt the validity of the study.
Of course there are lots of older gamers, as consoles became popular in the 1980s and PC gaming in the 1990s; but these numbers are bunk.
...
Oh. The bottom of the article says: "AARP Research used NORC’s Foresight 50-plus Panel to survey a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults ages 40-plus who own a gaming-eligible device and play video games on that device at least once a month."
Being one of those gamers, I do question why a lot of the games targeted at us (looking at you Path of Exile) has to have so much goddamned pointless busy-work clicking. I play a league, then skip a league, which means I skip buying a supporter pack, just because my arthritis can't put up with their bullshit interface year-round.
As a soon-to-be "gamer 50-plus" I think it's less that "Gamers 50-plus are [...] embracing gaming because they feel it’s time well spent" - most of them are simply continuing to play games because they have been doing it since their youth and don't see why they should stop at 50.
Ha! I'm in my mid 40s and I very rarely spend a few hours or even days to play really old strategy games, mostly by myself though (Master of Magic, Master of Orion II, etc).
I feel a bit weird knowing that I still enjoy these.
with 84% identifying it as their gaming device of choice and three in ten (30%) exclusively using their smartphones for gaming.
There it is. Sure, shovelware mobile gaming is technically a part of the gaming industry but should you really give a damn beyond economic reasons? It's like saying so and so group is a growing force in cinema but they're watching The Emoji Movie.
Who is crafting amazing experiences on mobile? Which smartphone games move you to tears? What studio is pushing graphics to the breaking point and making users go "oh my god, I didn't know games could look like this"? When's the last time you bought a soundtrack from an iPhone game? Nobody and never.
No 50+ gamers I know either use smart phones or consoles for gaming, well some use consoles. Smart phones suck for gaming, no tactile feel from virtual buttons.
Don't get me started. It's a huge market, there's enough consumer interest to make and sell phones with air triggers and actual cooling fans, yet somehow a d-pad and a couple buttons is a bridge too far.
I'm in a small gaming clan which plays a (dated) first-person shooter, and our oldest player is in his late 50s. I also know a lot of older people who play mobile games, or online poker, or Wordle. The three groups behave in radically different ways, and trying to understand their consumption is pointless without further segmentation. If you target the mobile gamers with ads about gaming mice they're not going to buy them, our 50-something has approximately zero chance of clicking on an ad for Clash of Clans, and the Wordle players would mostly be insulted by ads for online poker.
Same sort of problem as a survey of "readers" has, where fiction and non-fiction are so different that overall stats are misleading.