Gamers aged 55+ account for almost a third of gamers now, and that share is on the rise.
Older gamers are a growth opportunity for AA(A) publishers – here is how to capture it
Are they also all born on January first?
That's something I failed to consider when reading the headline. 😅
Aren't we all born on 4/20/69, in our heart of hearts?
no, it's January 1st 1901.
Does this include mobile games and especially gamefied gambling like candy crush etc because that I can believe.
It is tempting to assume that older gamers exclusively play low-fidelity games on their smartphones. This is simply untrue.
While mobile is certainly the biggest part of the games market in terms of revenues, 55+ gamers account for 23% of monthly PC gamers and 11% of monthly console gamers.
Yeah the conflation of mobile gaming with PC and console gaming is just bad. I don't know how the cut should be made tbh but this seems silly.
On the other side, more and more midlife+ in online games like Helldivers, cod and such.
I, for one, Welcome our nursing home LAN party overlords...
My generation was the first to have a childhood with video games, so it's not surprising we're sticking with them. I certainly have no intention to stop playing them as long as I'm physically able.
I went to school with Ian House. Absolute wanker.
Or rooms of old people all sucked into their screen not talking to eachother
Ya, not surprising. I'm in my late 40' and game. My father was gaming in his 70's until his death. My mother, also in her 70's, plays Minecraft. Video games aren't the domain of kids anymore. The kids who played them grew up and some folks started to take to them in their later years. They are just another form of entertainment now and not some nerdy, niche thing. Quit trying to gatekeep fun.
I wish this idea caught on to a larger portion of society. There's a dating site that has questions you can answer and see what a potential match has answered, one of which was "are computer games childish?"
An unfortunately large portion of women (ages 30-45) who answered that answer "yes" :(
(I'm not looking for men so I don't know how they respond, I wasn't trying to be sexist lol)
think about the parents of 30-45 year olds and how they might have raised their sons vs their daughters, and also the clear pandering to teenage boys in videogames 20 or so years ago. there's your answer.
thankfully both are changing with time. there are reactionaries who want to stop this change on both sides, but they will fail just like they failed before.
I'm gonna game until I fucking die.
I’d like to, that’s for sure.
I’m almost out of certified classics to play though and this loot box, cosmetic, buy this, buy that, always online crap don’t appeal to me.
There's a shit ton of good indie games out there, getting released every year.
This can happen when the global economy is in the toilet.
If only retirees can afford to participate in a hobby, thats usually an indicator that whatever that hobby is is too expensive. A lower price would make it more prolific and generate more potential sales, likely to increase revenue overall by volume.
Like how Ferrari cars are designed for 20 year olds but only 80 year olds can afford to buy them.
I see your point, but I'm not sure I would argue gaming is an expensive hobby. You can pick up a second-hand console and a handful of games under $500. PC gaming is a different beast (obviously).
To me this number just makes logical sense. A 55 year old could easily have grown up playing video games and leaning into that towards and into retirement seems like a pretty normal next step.
I would fully expect and hope that when I retire in ~25 years I'll join the ranks of older gamers.
I would expect someone's whose 55 is probably more interested in classic games anyway. An older friend of mine was in his 20s during the 80s and has fond memories of the arcades, Atari and NES. So that's what he plays.
When a single game costs $70 I’d call it an expensive hobby.
Sure, you can buy an old gen console and only purchase old second hand games, but modern gaming is expensive.
PC gaming is much cheaper. A desktop, while being more expensive initially, will last much longer than a console. And the games on PC are much, much cheaper.
I would say that the Steamdeck no longer makes PC gaming a different beast. Prior to that you would definitely lose people in self builds and budgeting complexities.
Games aren't ferraris. Get out of here with that. Just because you want the billion dollar games to cost $10 doesn't mean games are out of reach for everyone. Between free-to-play games and the ocean of indie games available online, gaming has never been more accessible.
The reason older people are gaming is because they're the first generation to have grown up with games as a thing. 55 year olds were children when the Atari came out. They've grown up with it. Why would they stop just because they're older?
I disagree. This is just a market maturing. Gaming is relatively new compared to other media and really started exploding in the late 80's and 90's. Someone aged 55 is still a decade away from retirement and has probably been playing games since the late 80's. It's totally possible they've been gamers the whole time.
And gaming is hardly so expensive as to be compared to Ferrari. There's still plenty of ways to play games cheap. People pick up used games and older consoles all the time. Even new, games aren't prohibitively expensive. Don't get me wrong. A new console is not cheap by any means, but there are plenty of ways to enjoy video games and not spend thousands. You don't have to have the newest stuff to enjoy games.
Also who said Ferrari's are designed for 20 year olds?
I think the point is just that young people don't participate as much as they would because they don't have the money for it. In previous decades young people had more money to spend.
Consoles and Gaming PC parts (GPUs especially) are increasing in price at a time when people are struggling to pay their bills. $70 for new games now, or you can pay $120 every year, but you don't own anything. I meanz, you also don't own the $70 games either, but you extra don't own games on a subscription service. Old games are there and fine, but in comparison to the current economy, where inflation around the globe is higher than it has been on average since video games were really a thing, new games are a very expensive hobby.
Directly dollar for dollar, it may be comparable, but taking the economy into picture, games in the past were cheaper. Especially considering how much revenue video games generate now. Prices should be lower, but expected infinite business growth from shareholders is preventing that.
Also who said Ferrari's are designed for 20 year olds?
Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari, did. He didn't specify exactly 20 year olds, but his quote was "I build cars for young men that only rich old men can afford." Or something similar to that effect, as the quote would have been originally in italian.
That doesn't explain why the 16-34 range is the biggest one by far and why the younger the age group the more likely they are to play online games which usually are far less respecting of players times - people with responsibilities need a pause button.
Many competitive FPS games also fit this category. Play a round for 15 minutes or a few in an hour, get back to life. Games with grind are less attractive - we know it's all just wasting time.
Like how Ferrari cars are designed for 20 year olds but only 80 year olds can afford to buy them.
I mean, making the comparison to motorsports just emphasizes how cheap gaming is as a hobby.
Autocross is as entry level as you can get and a typical ~$50 entry fee gets you maybe 10 minutes of seat time and it's typical to need to drive 2-3 hours each way for an event. That's before you start adding in things like the fact that a $1500 set of tires will last you a season or two at most, suspension and brake upgrades easily running a couple of thousand dollars, etc.
Start dipping into actual track time and fees jump to more like $250-750 plus around that much again for track insurance per event. And the upgrades needed for the car to hold up on track are even more expensive still. And this is all ignoring the purchase price of the car and potentially needing to trailer a dedicated track car.
I've almost certainly spent far less on PC gaming in the last 5 years combined than I have on motorsports in the past 3 months. I'm on the upper end of spending for most gamers and a dabbler at best when it comes to the cars.
The insanity of the GPU market since covid has put some upward pressure on things but A. the proliferation of great indie titles means you can get incredible value without breaking bank on the highest end equipment and B. even then, the money I spent literally tonight ordering just brake pads and rotors would buy you a 4070 all day long. And I went cheaper than I could have.
Gaming dollars go a long, long way. It's a hobby that was affordable even when I was younger and broke. It's still relatively affordable compared to many, many other hobbies.
And to prove your point even further: my friends and I went go-karting for someone's stag do a couple of weeks ago and it was £50 per person for two fifteen-minute sessions. And that's even more entry level than autocross, I'd argue!
We had to get there early, too, and get registered, get changed into overalls and helmet, etc. We had to go through an idiot-proof safety briefing. We had to wait for the previous group to finish their session. We had a break between our two sessions for drinks and to cool down / recover, and another session ran during that time, so twenty minutes there. All in all, our half-hour of driving probably came with around an hour and a half of downtime, which I think lowers the value proposition even more.
(Plus I got heatstroke during it and got increasingly ill as the day went on - and was unable to really eat during our restaurant meal or drink at the bars later in the day - which lowered the value proposition even more for me, ha!)
£100/hour of actual go-karting, versus £1/hour for most AAA games these days. I don't tend to like AAA games that much, for the most part, but even with all their bloat, recycled content, open-world downtime, etc, they still seem like better value per money per time than anything motorsports-related.
I agree with your general point about the economics of hobbies, but I’m not sure it applies here.
If you are sensible about it gaming is, in real buck-per-hour prices, one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available.
how'd they get from 26% in one segment to "almost one third" headline?
Who the fuck buys this drivel for £3,000
Surely if someone is buying research, they dont want to literally buy hype.
I had some serious demographic questions to get to 1/3. 26% sounds way more reasonable.
Damn I'm 54, I need to hold on another year...
Just hang on. You’re almost there. Almost 56. Other than some arthritis, gaming ain’t all that bad.
And my kids absolutely will get access to my Steam library after I'm gone. We'll see what they think about all those AVN, haha!
Just don't tell Valve!
I avoid online games because I'm old and don't have time to practice like teenagers do.
I play online games because they're still fun even if the teenagers are better than me
I like still being in my gaming prime (28) and already being better than your average FPS gamer.
Top scoring multiple matches in a row to have someone call you a sweaty no-life teenager only to drop that you work 10 hours a day and can still make them look like they'd never touched a controller before is fun every time.
Shit, my dad was going 30:5 in BLOPS II at age 57, he'd wait to use his mic in between rounds to laugh at the people bitching about the sweaty kid. Suddenly this deep ass voice just saying "get good"
Why would you so casually make me think about how long ago 2015 was :(
Woo-hoo, I'm a youngster (in this deomgraphic)!
This is also very likely due to older people seeing gaming as an affordable and enjoyable hobby, which would raise the average age. Gaming is the most accessible it has ever been, so it'd make sense.
Count me in. Only I wait until the price drops below $20 before ineven consider a purchase.
Im sorta surpised as even when I was in high school video games were something that was considered nerdy. Most had played them but it was considered a bit like comic books, cartoons, and toys. Something you grew out of. I would expect it to not be a major share until I am well over 55+. I though at first maybe it was just people getting new into it like mobile but the article says they make up 23% of the pc gamers and 11% of console (heck I don't even play console anymore). I wonder if some were influence by their kids?
I'm almost fifty, started gaming when I was a kid on Sinclair spectrum and BBC computers. Some of the figure is probably people who got into gaming later in life but some is just people who started early and kept going.
yeah but was it cool? Were most kids in high school gaming at your time? Im curious because im a bit over 50 so maybe 1989 or something was the floodgate year. I mean for 55+ to be such a large percentage it would mean a good percentage of the population itself must game in realtion to younger gen right. So I figure something close to 100% of teenagers game nowadays but when I was in high school it might have been under 10%
Gaming never truly recovered after the 2003 late golden age and 2006 fall when the first microtransaction released. Sims 2, kotor, Jedi outcast, fable, dark messiah, command conquer, wh40k dawn of war, battle for middle earth, morrowind, fallout 2, icewind, baldurs, system shock, tw medieval 2, cod 2, neverwinter, half life, gta sa, civ 4, aoe 2- most are still better than modern equivalents except graphics and QoL
The rare brief time when the big money flowed and fuelled innovation instead of playing it safe and stale. Almost everything today is just a rehash of that era with slapped microtransactions on top
that's only true for big publishers. sounds like you never look at indie or indie publisher games.
meanwhile I'm losing my mind because i don't think I'll ever have enough time to even try half the games in interested in playing.
just this month about a dozen games were released that I want to play. how will I ever keep up?
This is an absolutely absurd out of touch take. High quality games by indie devs is more common then ever, we are seeing a resurgence of story driven games that have ZERO MTX.
I got some news for ya pal, “gaming” is not Ubisoft and EA. For example, Sony’s exclusives: horizon, spider man, god of war, the last of us, uncharted, and that is ONLY SONY.
In the milsim genre there is a HUGE renaissance of games like ground branch, grayzone, six days in fallujah, etc. this is the case for many genres right now and has been for years at this point.
You are quite literally judging the ENTIRE fucking industry on a few big name studios and the shit they push out.
Putting that aside for a moment, even then, your take doesnt reflect reality. Sony is one of the biggest right now studio wise in console games and they’ve been bridging the gap to PC for years now.
In a shift from previous strategies, Sony has revealed a new focus for the PlayStation 5 that prioritizes increasing the amount of time users spend playing on the console, rather than solely concentrating on the quantity of game sales. This strategic change reflects an evolving consumer behavior observed during the era of the PS4, aiming to boost profitability through enhanced engagement within the PlayStation ecosystem
If anything, the big dogs are walking away from mtx and sales numbers and focusing on what makes good games that bring people back.
Furthermore,
The man who heads PlayStation Productions and product at PlayStation Studios believes that the future of gaming will be about "immersive narratives." In fact, Asad Qizilbash thinks developers will focus on emotional storytelling over visual fidelity in the future.
Which takes down your other stance about how it’s only about graphics these days. Again it’s not just the big dogs, have you seriously NOT seen the insane amount of extremely popular games that use retro styles? Years and years old like hotline Miami, or brand new like animal well, etc. it never stopped.
Video game dunkey’s BigMode studio is yet another great example of these concepts and priorities reaching popularity and approval
almost everything today is a rehash
You are simply telling on yourself here. We get it, you are not connected to where gaming is today, whether that be due to nostalgia or perhaps a hyper focus on a specific niche, but to judge the state of the entire goddamn industry based on that?
Bottom line: make ann effort to actually play some well received and highly regarded games just from the past five years and you’ll understand why your take is hollow.
I don't believe those numbers for a second, and they're trying to charge 3k for access. That's absurd.
it's 100% that they count mobile games as "gaming" so grandma and grandpa playing candy crush and wordle are "gamers" now. They list 11% on console but even that seems high. 23% on PC probably includes wordle too.
It might, but PC would definitely have its share of older gamers. MMORPGs for an example, attract them. I believe the oldest I ran into in my Runescape days was over 70. Of course that's if you believe peoples' claimed ages.
My mother plays a lot of solitaire. Are they including that?
They are definitely including casual mobile 'gamers' in the 1/3rd number.
The article says 55+ is only around 11% of console gamers, for example.
1/10 is still relatively significant. I would’ve figured that figure was lower.
At that price I believe the report doesn't even exist and they plan on writing it once some idiot buys it.
Modern science in a nutshell lmao