An Older Demographic May Soon Dominate Gaming

Reservoir Hill writes "An article from last week runs down the new mass audience for gaming among families, women and older people. The importance of the mass audience in gaming's spectacular growth is seen most clearly in the success of Nintendo's Wii, which is far outselling its more technically advanced hardware competitors, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and PlayStation 3 from Sony. Wii Play was the No. 2-selling game of last year even though it received an abysmal score of 58 out of 100 at Metacritic, which aggregates reviews. The Times says that as video games become more popular hard-core gamers are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience. 'Paradoxically, at a moment when technology allows designers to create ever more complex and realistic single-player fantasies, the growth in the now $18 billion gaming market is in simple, user-friendly experiences that families and friends can enjoy together.'"

Comments

Playability for the win!

[bigattichouse]

My kids can play the Wii, my mother in law can play the Wii, I can play.. guess what is the most played console in the house? Oh, and we can all play and interact together. Not all people who want to play video games live in their mother's basements. Games manufacturers are finally realizing this. Enough ultra-graphic-environment-Doom-clones, lets do something different - like actually interact with each other. Just think of "group-play" as a feature that they are working on... like graphics. So the Wii made a huge step in that direction, and didn't need to worry about building state of the art graphics. (yet)