More older women are gamers than young men

I assume hubby has tried Orcs must Die. Great fun and a good laugh to boot when you manage to set it all up so you can sit back and watch the mayhem.

sassandgroove said:

I have a mass effect hoodie and most people who recognize it compliment me but one guy assumed I was borrowing my hubby's hoodie. When I think about it I've been a gamer all my life I just didn't have regular access to a console until I got married. But I played my friends Atari when I was a kid and I had a gameboy in HS. My mom is too. She even played some side scrollers on her PC.

I play games mostly with hubs on Xbox. I like RPGs but they are time consuming. I also play silly games on my phone. But so does hubby. And how do you define serious gamer? I mean hubby plays mass effect and dragon age and call of duty but he also plays Peggle and katamari and angry birds and fruit ninja. Like me. (Except I don't play CoD).

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DeleyanLee said:

Per The Wall Street Journal: women make up half of all gamers

I'm wondering that that means to game creators, y'know?

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Well not much, because everybody knows that. The problem with this meme is that it doesn't separate social media games, mobile games, console games, handheld games, and computer games. Those are the primary markets, each with a different geographic audience, different demographics, different platform owners, different business models, and different marketing strategies.

It's an incredibly complicated industry but a very profitable one for some and so the number of players entering it every year is dizzying. I know, I worked in the industry for many, many years.

So you see a high profile ad for FIFA, Madden or Assassin's Creed or whatever and you might think, gee, that is really targeted at Western, teenage males. Yes, it is. Because that is who has the income and time to invest in AAA console games. The only people who give a toss about a PlayStation 4. They are the only ones statistically speaking going to waste $65 on a videogame.

It doesn't mean there are mobile games that are making more money, Bejeweled probably makes more money than any Bungie game. But you don't advertise mobile games on TV and in magazines, it is a waste of money. Your target audience is too broad. You throw it all into paid acquisition right on the device itself.

And half the money in free to play games is coming from foreign markets like China, Japan, Russia, India and the Middle East. You can't market resource intensive, story-driven premium games at them. They will have no idea what you are talking about. Not because they are stupid, but it's the language barrier.

Someone on Cracked.com wrote a great article about why Hollywood movies are increasingly stupid, brain-dead, effects laden explosion bores. The spoiler is because of foreign markets, where half the money comes from. You want simple dialogue that is easy to subtitle.

The same thing has been going on in videogames for years.

Video games are still a young genre but I'm glad to see a diverse range of people playing them. I think technological advances have definitely brought a wider variety of games to a larger audiences e.g. apps for phones making 'casual' gaming common. Gaming is more accessible, which I love, as I really think there is something for everyone.

I think the video game industry was initially focused on selling to a particular demographic: young men and boys, and because of this an environment was created and maintained that excluded anyone that didn't fall into that category. I could go further into how this encouraged a misogynistic atmosphere that discouraged women from working in the industry and de-emphasised equally-gendered narratives, as well as continuously re-instating that 'girls don't/aren't allowed to play games'.

I'm glad that image is slowly starting to change. Everyone and anyone can and should play games if they choose. No one should have to prove themselves as a 'gamer' and there shouldn't really be one set 'type' of person we expect to play video games.