This always seems to surprise people who don't play videogames. They never seem to understand why someone in his mid-thirties would be playing with videogames. Of course, one of the things they don't know is that I am actually in the perfect sweet spot for videogame publishers as I am exactly the same age as the average gamer.
Or at least, I was.
The latest news is that the average age of a gamer is now 37. Which, for the first time that I can recall, makes me younger than the average gamer (but only just). Which means that from now on out, I can expect games to no longer be catered to my tastes but to those old guys who don't have any reaction times worth speaking of.
All joking aside, for the average age to go up at a more rapid rate than my own aging is trending the opposite way to what I expected (assuming this is a trend and not just a statistical anomaly). On one level, there is obviously a pressure on the average age to go up as the people who are playing games get older (like me). However, there is another pressure on the average age to either go down or stay steady as new kids start taking up the hobby.
For the average age to go up more at a more rapid pace than my own aging seems to imply that older gamers are starting to take up the hobby. To be fair, they may not be playing the same AAA reaction based FPS shooter that younger gamers love but that doesn't change the fact that older people are taking up videogames.
Which is pretty frakkin' awesome if you think about it.
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2 comments:
It's the impact of the game consoles like Nintendo Wii. Makes simpler games accessible and "interesting" to the older gamer.
I think you'd see a different picture for PC gamers...
I suspect another big factor at play is the emergence of mobile gaming (ie games played on mobile phones). Bear in mind that, according to the full report, 55% of gamers played games on their mobile phones or other handheld device.
The breakdown of genre in the full report is also quite interesting in that it confirms many of my own preconceptions around the target demographic of console vs pc gamers. Console gamers predominantly prefer action (21.7%), sports games (16.3%) and shooters (15.9%) whereas PC gamers were predominantly strategy (33.6%) and RPGs (20.3%).
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