from Hacker News

Gamers 50-plus are a growing force in the tech market

by ChancyChance on 4/23/23, 6:16 PM with 167 comments

• by strken on 4/24/23, 4:32 AM

  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.

• by nirav72 on 4/24/23, 12:02 AM

  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.

• by antiterra on 4/24/23, 12:18 AM

  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.

• by ChancyChance on 4/23/23, 6:20 PM

  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.

  Also: AARP commenting on over 50? /sighs/

• by PeterStuer on 4/24/23, 6:12 AM

  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.

• by spaceman_2020 on 4/24/23, 7:26 AM

  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.

  I just want to have an hour of fun.

• by yourmatenate on 4/24/23, 5:56 AM

  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.

• by trashface on 4/24/23, 4:33 AM

  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.

• by satvikpendem on 4/24/23, 12:49 AM

  > 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.

• by sombragris on 4/24/23, 12:35 AM

  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.

• by ChrisMarshallNY on 4/24/23, 1:35 AM

  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.

• by adamc on 4/24/23, 4:13 AM

  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.

• by dagorenouf on 4/24/23, 8:51 AM

  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.

• by patja on 4/23/23, 10:26 PM

  Who is this surprising? 50 year olds grew up on Asteroids, Donkey Kong, and Zork.

• by jasonjamerson on 4/24/23, 12:02 AM

  This just tells us that the first generation to grow up with gaming still enjoys it.

• by ulrashida on 4/24/23, 1:52 PM

  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.

• by milchek on 4/24/23, 7:02 AM

  My father is 71. He plays World of Tanks and CS:GO (against bots only for this one!).

  He’s always loved games, from the moment he brought home a second hand C64 that we’d play International Soccer or Olympic Games on when I was a kid.

• by crooked-v on 4/24/23, 12:14 AM

  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.

• by gaoshan on 4/24/23, 1:55 AM

  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.

• by eur0pa on 4/24/23, 5:01 AM

  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.

• by AussieWog93 on 4/24/23, 3:27 AM

  >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.

• by anyfactor on 4/24/23, 7:10 AM

  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.

• by kristianp on 4/24/23, 1:09 AM

  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".

• by pugworthy on 4/24/23, 5:21 AM

  62 and spend waaay too much time playing World of Tanks.

• by wkat4242 on 4/24/23, 8:20 AM

  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.

• by einpoklum on 4/24/23, 8:25 AM

  "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."

  so maybe 45% of _those_ are gamers?

• by eek2121 on 4/24/23, 1:24 AM

  Doesn't surprise me. I am in my 40s and my Steam library alone contains almost 2,000 games. That is to say nothing of GOG, Epic, and other platforms.

  Many of us tech folks are huge gamers.

• by keithnz on 4/24/23, 7:52 AM

  I'm 50+, of course we are more represented these days, we are the first gamer kids and we are growing up and still play games!

• by gr4yb34rd on 4/24/23, 7:43 AM

  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.

• by rob74 on 4/24/23, 9:04 AM

  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.

• by javchz on 4/24/23, 2:48 AM

  My grandma, she's 90 something, and you can bet she's got more hours on Candy Crush than a professional eSports player has on their MOBAS or FPS.

  Companies that think games are only for young people are leaving a lot of money on the table.

• by simonebrunozzi on 4/24/23, 11:18 AM

  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.

• by causality0 on 4/24/23, 2:56 AM

  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.

• by cultureswitch on 4/24/23, 9:03 AM

  I always find that qualifying anyone who spends an hour a week playing a mobile game a "gamer" is very misleading if we want useful market categories.

• by keithalewis on 4/24/23, 9:23 AM

  Never underestimate how many 50 year olds can fit into their mom's basement.