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Average Gamer Is 37 Years Old
kolbe writes "A new study from the Entertainment Software Association suggests that the average age of today's gamers is between the 37 and 41 years old. If true, does this mean that game studios should be adjusting their demographics accordingly? Is Generation X the next 'baby boomer' market for the gaming industry?"
I'm sure as we go further into the age of technology this number will rise
We're all still mentally 15, so targeting us with boobs and explosions is still cool.
Sorry
In this market, you're either unemployed (and looking), or overworked doing the workload of potentially three employees at 60+ hours/week (companies cutting costs). From my view, there' no middle ground between work and play. So at 34 years old, gaming is a legendary form of recreation I simply don't have the time for.
Life is not for the lazy.
That is absolutely and utterly not true. Think about what kind of numbers it would take to get an average that high and compare it to reality of what demographics are known to play games and you won't even need to read the article to know it's BS. Also, at the time of this posting, you can't read the article because this story doesn't link to one. Is it April Fools day already?
Yes, I play Dungeons and Dragons Online and most people are 20-40 and it's great because kids get really annoying in games (I'm 23 btw) but since practically every teenager plays video games, they would drive the actual calculated average to around 20 at the highest, not 37. 37 year old gamers exist, they're just not the average.
No, it just means that the same number of people playing games are a lot older than the average.
I don't know many kids these days that aren't playing consoles, a few of them seem to also play PC games as well.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I'm 39 and a flight simmer (DCS:A-10C, LockOn: Flaming Cliffs 2, DCS:Ka-50 and IL-2:Clifss of Dover). Do play a little bit of twitch gaming but get bored of it. For my flight simming I have thousands of dollars of gear (Thrustmaster Warthog, rudder pedals, Track IR, multiple monitors, high-end PC). Most of my colleagues are of similar maturity and also have full sets of gear. We older gamers might be fewer in numbers but we are a goldmine in value (and we pay for our software since pirating is a complete hassle - and time is more precious to us fogies than money). Too bad we're completely invisible to the main-stream game reporting and gaming companies - especially the latter who produce games with purile content and weak storylines (I mean, effective modern combat units fight *for* their teammates, despite humored grumbling they don't bitch fight among themselves all the time).
Heres the original pdf of the study.
http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2011.pdf
its up from 34 last year apparently. So gamers are ageing 3 years for every 1.
This is the generation that came of age in the 90's. Most of them made more money than their parents on their first job out of college. They were what all the millenials think they ought to be. And having created the Internet, made or lost even more money in the housing boom, they are now going Galt by playing video games.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
So now we're posting submissions without sources that try to make an entire discussion out of a single alleged factoid? Seriously?
Most links I can find on this topic point to CNET, but this is the closest thing I can find to the original source. One website high in the google results links to pdf of this supposed study, but the link is dead.
I don't want to get on a "remember-when" rant, but here I go anyway... I'm 42. I grew up in the late 70s/early 80s. I remember the hand-held electronic games (Galaxy Invader 1000), home video game consoles (first the pong-style games, then Atari VCS, Intellevision, Vectrex!), the first big coin-op games (Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, Pac Man), home computers (Atari 400/800, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum). This was a new and exciting time. Best toys ever. I never really played board games or sports (until university). It was all video games. New things came monthly... and that continued through the 16-bit era to PCs. I remember Wolfenstein 3D and the original Doom when it was brand new. I remember Half Life. Hell, I remember (and still own) flight simulators for the ZX Spectrum, Atari 800, Atari ST (SubLogic FS:II), and every version of MS Flight Simulator for the PC since 1992. Now I play Wii games and on the PC, Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead.
It doesn't surprise me at all that the average age of gamers is in my neighborhood. Does it surprise anyone (besides youngsters)?
Saving money is another good reason. In other countries (I'm thinking of Japan, for example) it is perfectly acceptable for a person to live with their parents until the day they get married. That way, they have a nice nest egg saved up for after they get married.
Having blown tens of thousands of dollars on rent when I was single - that actually seems like a pretty good deal to me.
I have heard it suggested a few times that this is true of all game designers, that when a real designer plays a game, all he sees are the design decisions; the game itself can't be seen behind the mechanics, and that a good game for a designer is a well-designed game, which is not necessarily related to having fun with the gameplay. Richard Bartle once wrote an interesting blog entry about a zone's design in World of Warcraft; he definitely doesn't see and play the game like most people.
I am glad people like you exist, because that's why I have games. I think you're really missing out sometimes, though.
Darn, that's too bad. I just found this really cool game. You start with an empty text file and the goal is to combine keywords and codes in order to create a procedural algorithm that produces an environment containing further goals for others to complete.
What they care about is mean time between purchase at full retail value for the same product every other short-attention-span twitch spender is buying that week.
Even when I gamed a lot, I only bought the epic titles and beat them to death. My passing from the gaming demographic went unnoticed by the marketroids.
The rule of thumb is that bad money drives out good. When the idiot demographic pays too much for bad content, the companies soon lose interest in making the good content.
I'm sure I just opened myself up for contradiction by epic counter-example. I rest my case.
Read the happiness literature on novelty saturation, then estimate the supply/demand curve intersection involving those who haven't.
I like both.
However, as a gamer falling into the middle age category as well I can understand your hatred for games to some extent. Although I'm still spending quite some time on gaming, I'm buying less and less games because games have become more and more stupid. I've been wondering for a long time why studios and producers don't make games that are more suitable for halfway mature people. With almost no exceptions the marketing and the content still seem to be devised for really stupid 14-15 year old boys living on the countryside in the US and being extreme patriots. Somehow I doubt this profile matches the profile of the people like me who actually buy games.
It has come to a point where you need to make considerable efforts to just being able tolerate the main story. Take for example BFBC 2, which I have played recently. The game mechanics was okay but the background story really felt like an insult. Even 15 year old boys are rarely stupid enough to appreciate such a plot.
Also, if there were an MMORPG or even just an online shooter were you can only get an account after having proved that you're above 30, I'd probably spent more than 0 hours a week online. Not that I have much time anyway...
Probably not, actually. The median age in the USA is 36.8 years old.
Basically at this point the average gamer is just the average guy. For every guy under 37 that plays video games, there's someone over 37 who also plays video games, AND that's essentially the exact same information you'd get by their ages alone.
Really, gaming has already spread through all age segments. You have preschoolers playing edutainment games, and you even have 80 year old grandmas in WoW raids, and everything in between. (But not everyone admits it. Mom is 30 if you ask her in WoW.)
There isn't really much way for it to go much higher than the median age, unless it actually gets less popular among young 'uns than among senior citizens. I don't think anyone will manage to make gaming unpopular with kids any time soon, so I'd expect that to just follow the median age in the near future.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If including the casual gamers "throws the numbers", then it throws them to their correct value. If someone plays enough Angry Birds or whatever, they are gamers.
Besides, it's pretty stupid to divide some genres as not really games, as this basically would mean a lot of us who started in the early 80's never actually played a game. Most of the games that were available on a ZX-81 or ZX Spectrum or C-64 or even early IBM PC games, didn't even have the complexity of cell phone games these days.
Heck, the whole video game genre started with games like Pong.
I don't think anyone thought that people playing those are anything but gamers. We didn't think, "ah, well, they can't be Real Gamers, because nobody invented Real Gamer games like first person shooters yet."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
a good game for a designer is a well-designed game, which is not necessarily related to having fun with the gameplay.
If the gameplay isn't fun, the design isn't good.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Actually I'm pretty sure that's par for the course everywhere in the world outside of the US. It's the exception, not the rule, that parents kick their kids out of the house as soon as legally allowed, leaving them drowing in bills and rents before they've even finished school, never mind managed to get a well-paying job.
This was only really possible thanks to America's cheap land that enabled surburban expansion whereby anyone even on minimum wage could afford a cheap house, and the productive economy that enabled everyone to get a job.
Now that economic reality is setting in, America's advantages being eroded, and the debt which supported this unsustainable lifestyle reaching its limits, they might have to accept living in the parents basement like the rest of the world.
I like your distinction, it sums things up quite nicely.
From now on, I'll call anyone who has played any kind of electronic entertainment "gamers", and anyone who is actively engaged in gaming, and digesting related news "gaming enthusiasts".
If there are "casual" gamers who are "hardcore" about their games, they'd certainly belong in the category of gaming enthusiasts. However, the vast majority who only dabble in gaming as a way of passing time, wouldn't fall into the category.
Gaming enthusiast as a term would provides a meaningful distinction for the purpose of communication, while avoiding the perjorative associations linked to the more commonly used terms of "casual" and "hardcore".