Game Daily has a feature up on minorities in gaming titled “Marketing to game minorities“. The most interesting bit of it all, I think, is the fact that the audience is getting older. There are a lot of seniors out there and in a decade or two, they might be a big enough segment to cater to.
You wonder what this might mean, design-wise. I know I’m thinking more and more that these various games are not worth my time – just this morning I was on the tram to work and with Surface to Air’s slow buildup sending me on a one-minute flight from reality, I realized in an instant just how much time of my life I’ve spent playing games. What has it given me? Why do I do it? I’m not at all sure, but I think I’m going to need better reasons to continue doing so as time goes on.
Certainly my tolerance for crap has gone down. I jump on GameFAQs the moment I’m stuck and if I feel that a game isn’t doing enough to warrant my time, I let it be. This does mean that rare is the game I find incentive to complete.
I hope that catering to older gamers – not seniors in general, but senior gamers – means better experiences for everyone. If old signs still hold true, this only happens when the designers are actually nearing retirement age themselves, seeing how developers tend to make games for themselves.
It is going to be an exciting time, supposing that at least some professionals in the field do stick with their profession that long. As it is, the industry burns up way too many of its craftsmen. Because I think that the senior developers will also have a low tolerance for generic crap.
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