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.
My understanding is that the budget required to build a game perceived as "modern" is higher and higher each year, meaning that studios need to target a very large market to be profitable. This is for example why we don't see complex RTS and arena shooters anymore: their market is too small to pay for the investment. The 50+ years old video game market is tiny, and you'd need very different marketing (compared to what works with the usual 15-25yo segment) to target it.
It is true that lots of indie games find success with smaller budgets. But I suspect that lots of indie developers are not 50+ years old. Game development is mostly a craft, and unsurprisingly indie game developers prefer to work on projects similar to what they themselves enjoy.
I'm not sure the market is as tiny as you think. 4 out of 10 adults over 50 play on average 12 hours per week. By reading the article it seems that many are casual gamers who use games to relax, and women are the most frequent players. I suspect you will also find a large portion of 30+ gamers playing the same type of games.
To me it seems like a large enough market to target. Candy crush has nailed the target group (Women 35+) and is making lots of money.
there still are plenty of RTS, and probably also arena shooters, depending on what your requirements for inclusion are, coming out. maybe you don't see them because they are drowned out by other stuff, but there still are. (for instance, AOE4 is recent, unreal tournament is soon releasing I think)
I’ve been in similar gaming groups that had plenty of people in their 50s. While they would center around an older game like, say, Battlefield 4, the members played newer shooters as well. Further, older players probably have more disposable income for in-game purchases, even in a game highly popular with younger players.
It's become more and more strange to me that the gaming market
isn't segmented by what they play.
There a lot more precise and intricate segmentation in the actual industry. Advertising to gain new players (known in mobile as "user acquisition") is it's own profession and a lot of money and resources are spent on improving it.
Planetside 2 (2012), and formerly the original Planetside (2003). They're both heavily community-oriented games. 2 has gameplay somewhat similar to Battlefield.
Edit: To expand on what I mean by community-oriented, here's a genealogy of the different outfits (equivalent of a clan/guild) on one of the Planetside 2 servers: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/887173952080863253/91.... Once you're used to the game mechanics you slowly get drawn into the metagame of complementary or conflicting personalities, outfit history, schisms, cooperation, drama, competitive play, leadership, and so on.
Not the parent, but I still regularly (let's say once a month) Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (2003) [1] with a number of friends, although it has now a community that keeps developing/maintaining the open source code [2], so I'm not sure it if counts as dated
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.
Yeah, anyone shocked by this is confused by the nature of both humans and linear time.
This is why it's impossible for me to take seriously anyone who claims that a given medium is only for kids. Kids grow up, and adults who love a medium move it forwards into something adults can take seriously, thereby proving that anxiety over whether a medium is "too young" for you is fundamentally adolescent, and rooted in anxiety over your own maturity. Certain works can be too immature to satisfy an adult, but a given medium is infinitely malleable and can tell stories at any level.
Of course, this relates to the similarly pointless diatribes that refuse to distinguish between a medium, a genre, and a level of quality, and therefore insist that a given medium is only for works in a given genre with a given (assumed low) level of quality. I don't have time for a single second of that nonsense.
I think there really was a time when gaming seemed like a fundamentally limited medium that was really mostly for children. Non-bankswitched 2600 games, for example, are not really a medium that can be used for very much interesting storytelling, just not-very-repeatable (unless you're 8 years old) "flashing colors" experiences. I agree that it wasn't long after the 2600 era that this changed dramatically though. In the US, it realistically was the success of the Commodore 64 that changed this. 64k of memory and much more capable video hardware completely changed the game. Similar machines led this revolution in Europe.
Actually, even before the 2600 there were complex mainframe and Unix games (for the very limited audiences that had access to these machines), but my point is that I can't really blame somebody in, say, 1978 seeing an Atari cartridge game and thinking it would never be something adults were interested in.
Also not surprised. I was impressed with how many older people played World of Warcraft just for the social life. Can't get 3 folks over for bridge? No problem, fire up the computer.
Put a bunch of older guys in the world of Horizon Zero Dawn to go out machine hunting, I'm sure they would be all for it. Add a crafting/building component so that groups could build villages and what not (minecraft meets HZD meets Counter Strike) kind of environments, it would be much more fun that sitting around watching the TV right?
And I am an avid Path Of Exile player with Civilization thrown in between leagues and play Splendor with my brother over the Internet practically daily.
There are many of us that grew up in the 80s / early 90s who still play games today.
I think the view of gamers are 20 years behind reality and uses outdated stereotypes. Just look at the comment in another thread that assumes 50-year olds play bridge, like being old means you are stuck in a 90s cliche of what older people do.
Why wouldn't we continue playing games? There may be a period in life where work and/or kids takes more of your gaming time, but once you get older you have more personal time that can be spent on gaming.
The average US gamer is currently 35 years old and increasing. 46% of American gamers are female.
I was thinking the same thing. I just turned 50, learned to code on a ZX Spectrum, and regularly play Space Station 14, Dwarf Fortress and Elite Dangerous among others.
I don’t know if you remember, but before the cartridge consoles, we had a shit ton of black and white PONG consoles… all with the same 5 games. I think they all used the same chip but changed the packaging and controllers.
Yeah, I remember those single game machines as well. But like most kids , including me the time , the first exposure to a home console was when the Atari 2600 was released. It seemed liked everyone had one. Of course there were few kids that had the ColecoVision or Intellivsion box (with its weird funky controller)
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.
It's so weird when that happens. During the Wii boom my parents visited for Christmas. I got them into Mario Kart and on Christmas Eve I cooked for the family. When done, I had to repeatedly encourage my parents to please stop playing Mario Kart and join my wife and me for Christmas dinner before the food gets cold. Very strange to experience this in reverse, as I still had vivid memories of my parents trying to pull me away from Link's Awakening on my GameBoy many Christmases earlier.
After a month of heavy MidJourney use, I feel like MJ really needs a conversation mode more than anything. I can get images that are 80% of what I want, or 90%, but that final 10% can take so many rerolls. It's like crafting legendary loot in an RPG and hoping for best-in-slot stats. The grind takes exponentially more time the closer you get to what you want.
So many of my favorite image creations could be fixed simply by being able to say "hey try redrawing the hand with 4 visible fingers this time" or "turn that frown upside down".
I asked in their support forums about this and a moderator (?) glibly told me "MJ is not Photoshop". Ok, and? Imagine if GPT-4 only allowed one-shot prompts and that is kinda what MJ feels like.
I expect we will get there soon, MJ needs a conversation mode soon or they will be beaten in the market by someone who does. I feel foolish for buying an annual subscription to MJ if they do not realize this... hopefully they're working on it.
"Send to img2img" seems to be the closest thing to a conversation mode in SD.
Once I get something somewhat close to what I want I send it to img2img mode that accepts both an image and a prompt as inputs and refine it further from there.
Video slot machine are HUGE in senior centers. I'm still shocked at how many people actually play digital slot machines as the odds of winning posted on the machine are literally the odds of winning.
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.
I'm another 50+ gamer - I tend to like MMOrpgs but I'm not a fan of PVP..I prefer a nice story based setup. I also like lots of 'leisure' activities like crafting, hobbies, fishing, collections, housing and cosmetics (I find them all to be good to relax/chill or kill time with). I can't really handle the current 'pixel-art' craze - I waited to long for stuff to progress beyond that. But I've found Lord of the Rings Online to have a really good story, tons of stuff to do, and huge zones to explore. At 16 years old, the graphics are not exactly 'cutting edge' - but they're not bad, and they are overhauling them. ESO wasn't bad either. Harvesting in FF:ARR was an RSI inducing click fest but it was really pretty and I think it has housing now. ArcheAge was way too much like a second job...
WoW floored me, it was what I had always wanted in a game since first playing Ultima (I). The grind and the silliness finally killed it tho (plus trying to wrangle time to play after putting the kids to bed, I got very little sleep for 2 years). Funny you mention LotR online, as my guild lost a number of players to it when it first came out. Didn't know it was still alive and kicking! I kinda lament missing Eve Online, that also sounded fun.
EDIT. Mac support deprecated on LotR. :( And I only use my PC through Remote Desktop... maybe i'll give it a whirl anyways....
Photorealism is definitely something that I feel is way over-targeted. It has never been something that makes or breaks a game for me. Even worse, games that try to sell themselves on photorealism tend to be a negative sign of the gameplay. I much prefer any other cohesive artistic style. I don't think any of my favorite (/most played) games have a style of realism: (Modded) Minecraft, Factorio, Civilization V/IV, Slay the Spire, Stellaris, Terraria, Rocket League, (Old School) Runescape, and RimWorld.
> Photorealism is definitely something that I feel is way over-targeted. It has never been something that makes or breaks a game for me.
It's bugged me for years that so many people don't see this. Photorealistic Candy Land is still just playing Candy Land, but so many people are driven by photorealism and eat it up.
Ikr. So hard to filter thru the trash. I find a nice guided semi-open world game is my jam. Disco Elysium. Last of us. Uncharted series. I do enjoy some of the tight metroidvanias as well. Dead cells. Ori. Etc... Happy hunting!
The woman who sold me my last phone was probably in her early 20s, and she joined AARP for the discounts on her phone plan.
Off topic: the old farts in the picture hold the controller like old farts. The default way for people my age to pick up a Playstation or Xbox controller is to have your trigger fingers nowhere near the R1, L1 buttons....
I like FPS depending on the style and gameplay. Frantic MMO FPS such as CoD don't have any appeal to me, but as I said before, I liked Quake 4, and since then I played a number of FPS, most of them purchased from GOG: Crysis, Far Cry 1 and 2 (truly excellent game in many respects), Doom 3, Immortal Redneck, F.E.A.R. (another masterpiece)... What I didn't like was the Half-Life series, even though I can easily see how foundational they were for the genre. Too much puzzle solving.
Now I mostly play action RPGs, I'm currently playing Dragon Age: Inquisition. Nice game, although there are various aspects in which I am less than impressed.
Parent is right, the least thing I worry about are fps above 24, refresh rates, and insane difficulty levels. I play most games on Normal or Easy difficulties.
If you liked The Stanley Parable, the creator of the game made a sort of meta game about the development process called The Beginner's Guide. It's not in the same league, but it's an interesting experience.
Stanley Parable was pretty awesome in it's simplicity. Right there with you when it comes to high tech fancy graphics and animations and over the top storytelling instead of adding the equivalent manhours to gameplay.
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.
5. Nobody starts playing it in 2023. Dated design, inaccessible, janky, new player interest/engagement is near-zero. It keeps going based on retaining old players.
But even after almost 20 years, there's never been a real 'WoW beater', an MMO with comparable 'game feel', decent endgame PvE content, and a very customisable UI.
Hmm, but 50+ year olds would have been 30+ when it released, and so way too busy with life to suffer through the boring mandatory leveling up to the end of the game, where (I hear), the "real" game starts ?
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.
Yeah, I'm 38. I don't care about story, dialogs, whatever. I only care about game feeling and mechanics. If there are cutscenes I can't cancel, I'm out in a blink. Hence, I usually play competitive online games (currently a lot of Wild Rift), because they don't come with all that baggage.
A few good single-player games I played that have the story unfold in the background while you play:
- Hotline Miami (fast action, only few cutscenes, nice retro style)
- Dysmantle (story unfolds mostly through objects in the world)
- Raft (survival game, story is completely told through objects in the game)
- Valheim (almost no cut-scenes, but gets a bit repetitive after a while)
> I only care about game feeling and mechanics. If there are cutscenes I can't cancel, I'm out in a blink. Hence, I usually play competitive online games (currently a lot of Wild Rift), because they don't come with all that baggage.
I'm in a similar boat but I am 40.
My goto since about 6 to 7 years are roguelikes and fighting games. Those are very accommodating for gameplay-focused games that can be played in short bursts and they are very enjoyable for me at least.
I would care about a story - if they were not so stupid and time wasting. Stories in books and tv series matter to me. But, video game stories are just badly written. When they try to make characters, they end full of false sentimentalism, when they dont try it they end up wooden.
> I don't know why but any game that [...] has complex controls just loses me immediately
For me, the cutoff point is any game that requires combinations of button presses. The Xbox controller already has a crazy number of buttons. Any game that requires me to e.g. press the left stick down while simultaneously pressing the shoulder button is just an instant no. I remember abandoning the latest Doom game for this reason - it was just too much.
> there should be a market for games where I can just jump in, have 30 minutes of fun by myself, and log off
I've been playing Spelunky 2 for most of the last year for precisely this reason. Randomly generated levels, runs that last less than 15 minutes (sometimes seconds!) and gameplay that's simple to pick up but which has considerable depth when you get into it.
There is no way I could finish GTA, BoTW, or Diablo. I’m 40, I have a career. I have plenty of items to collect to upgrade stuff in my real life, plenty of menus too. I’m OK with complicated controls if they are revealed slowly. But there is an amazing amount of busy work in games these days. I stick to Rocket League and Overwatch and forego the skins and other tedium.
Diablo 3 is a very streamlined game... (perhaps too much ?)
Also, I find this ridiculous and a symptom of bad pacing, but most "competitive" people seem to prefer to skip it entirely : takes only a few minutes with the help of a high level player.
EDIT : as an example, the current «season» (where you restart the whole accumulation game from scratch across all season characters) added an «altar» where you can sacrifice random items to get season-wide character boosts. I though I was going crazy not finding the altar at the described & screenshotted location... it's because it's NOT available in story mode – only in the adventure-(the whole world starts open to you)-mode ! Nobody even thought to point that out : not in the (quite long) official season description, not in the guides that players made !!
You might want to look into indie games. They tend to focus on simple controls and interesting, more experimental, mechanics.
If you like puzzles, you might like Patrick's Parabox (sic), Baba is You. If you like strategy games, try Into the Breach. Mini Metro and Mini Motorways give you a hyper-minimalistic take on the city-building genre. All of these are eminently playable in half-hour slices.
If you're willing to have your mind changed about storytelling, try Return of the Obra Dinn or Hades, or maybe Subnautica.
My favourite game of the last 10 years was Ori, but every time I have a free afternoon to kill I have to start again. Because I forget everything in the half year I was absent and that game builds the skill you need to play the game... I'm at loss every time I sit down.
So my current favourite games are 2-4 hour long that tells a good story. Eg Journey, tale of two brothers, slay the princess, Stanley's parable...
You're basically me, except I'm a year younger and you need to switch out GTA 5 and Diablo with the Hitman trilogy. I feel exactly the same way as you do about gaming.
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.
50 here too. TOTK is the first game I've preordered in at least a decade, which is surprising since BOTW was the first/only Zelda game I ever played. Big open-world games that I can sink my teeth into for a month or two seems to be my favorite genre nowadays.
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.
For you or anyone else that has numbness in the hands, a neck x-ray could be enlightening. As we hunch a lot we start to deform the cervical spine into pinching the nerves that run all the way down our arms into our hands. Problems in the neck area often manifest as symptoms anywhere in the hands, arms, and shoulders. Treatment varies, but I personally find a cervical dennerroll quite helpful.
Two severe pinches on the cervical spine here. Always start with a physical exam and let the doctor order the appropriate imaging. X-rays will not likely reveal anything going on with the spinal cord itself, that is in the realm of MRI or CT. A good neurosurgeon will know what to order.
I also have problems with games where you have to hold the mouse buttons down extended periods. But there is help to be had, especially if you have problems working [1], but also in general [2]. It's usually a few meetings where you get to do some movement while they feel your joints and then you get some exercises strengthening muscles or stretching sinews. Picking up archery might be good for your shoulders and posture too :-)
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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.
It is true that lots of indie games find success with smaller budgets. But I suspect that lots of indie developers are not 50+ years old. Game development is mostly a craft, and unsurprisingly indie game developers prefer to work on projects similar to what they themselves enjoy.
To me it seems like a large enough market to target. Candy crush has nailed the target group (Women 35+) and is making lots of money.
Perhaps the issue is just segmenting by age vs device/game type
Edit: To expand on what I mean by community-oriented, here's a genealogy of the different outfits (equivalent of a clan/guild) on one of the Planetside 2 servers: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/887173952080863253/91.... Once you're used to the game mechanics you slowly get drawn into the metagame of complementary or conflicting personalities, outfit history, schisms, cooperation, drama, competitive play, leadership, and so on.
[1] https://www.splashdamage.com/games/wolfenstein-enemy-territo... [2] https://www.etlegacy.com/
This is why it's impossible for me to take seriously anyone who claims that a given medium is only for kids. Kids grow up, and adults who love a medium move it forwards into something adults can take seriously, thereby proving that anxiety over whether a medium is "too young" for you is fundamentally adolescent, and rooted in anxiety over your own maturity. Certain works can be too immature to satisfy an adult, but a given medium is infinitely malleable and can tell stories at any level.
Of course, this relates to the similarly pointless diatribes that refuse to distinguish between a medium, a genre, and a level of quality, and therefore insist that a given medium is only for works in a given genre with a given (assumed low) level of quality. I don't have time for a single second of that nonsense.
Actually, even before the 2600 there were complex mainframe and Unix games (for the very limited audiences that had access to these machines), but my point is that I can't really blame somebody in, say, 1978 seeing an Atari cartridge game and thinking it would never be something adults were interested in.
Put a bunch of older guys in the world of Horizon Zero Dawn to go out machine hunting, I'm sure they would be all for it. Add a crafting/building component so that groups could build villages and what not (minecraft meets HZD meets Counter Strike) kind of environments, it would be much more fun that sitting around watching the TV right?
I don't think bridge is very popular with GenX. I could be wrong though.
Yeah, I had a ZX Spectrum when I was ten.
And I am an avid Path Of Exile player with Civilization thrown in between leagues and play Splendor with my brother over the Internet practically daily.
Completely fits.
I think the view of gamers are 20 years behind reality and uses outdated stereotypes. Just look at the comment in another thread that assumes 50-year olds play bridge, like being old means you are stuck in a 90s cliche of what older people do.
Why wouldn't we continue playing games? There may be a period in life where work and/or kids takes more of your gaming time, but once you get older you have more personal time that can be spent on gaming.
The average US gamer is currently 35 years old and increasing. 46% of American gamers are female.
ColecoVision
I don’t know if you remember, but before the cartridge consoles, we had a shit ton of black and white PONG consoles… all with the same 5 games. I think they all used the same chip but changed the packaging and controllers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AY-3-8500
http://www.pong-story.com/gi.htm
It was an interesting era in chip design.
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.
So many of my favorite image creations could be fixed simply by being able to say "hey try redrawing the hand with 4 visible fingers this time" or "turn that frown upside down".
I asked in their support forums about this and a moderator (?) glibly told me "MJ is not Photoshop". Ok, and? Imagine if GPT-4 only allowed one-shot prompts and that is kinda what MJ feels like.
I expect we will get there soon, MJ needs a conversation mode soon or they will be beaten in the market by someone who does. I feel foolish for buying an annual subscription to MJ if they do not realize this... hopefully they're working on it.
Once I get something somewhat close to what I want I send it to img2img mode that accepts both an image and a prompt as inputs and refine it further from there.
Also: AARP commenting on over 50? /sighs/
edit: spelling
EDIT. Mac support deprecated on LotR. :( And I only use my PC through Remote Desktop... maybe i'll give it a whirl anyways....
It's bugged me for years that so many people don't see this. Photorealistic Candy Land is still just playing Candy Land, but so many people are driven by photorealism and eat it up.
Off topic: the old farts in the picture hold the controller like old farts. The default way for people my age to pick up a Playstation or Xbox controller is to have your trigger fingers nowhere near the R1, L1 buttons....
Now I mostly play action RPGs, I'm currently playing Dragon Age: Inquisition. Nice game, although there are various aspects in which I am less than impressed.
Parent is right, the least thing I worry about are fps above 24, refresh rates, and insane difficulty levels. I play most games on Normal or Easy difficulties.
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.
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.
A few good single-player games I played that have the story unfold in the background while you play:
- Hotline Miami (fast action, only few cutscenes, nice retro style)
- Dysmantle (story unfolds mostly through objects in the world)
- Raft (survival game, story is completely told through objects in the game)
- Valheim (almost no cut-scenes, but gets a bit repetitive after a while)
I'm in a similar boat but I am 40.
My goto since about 6 to 7 years are roguelikes and fighting games. Those are very accommodating for gameplay-focused games that can be played in short bursts and they are very enjoyable for me at least.
For me, the cutoff point is any game that requires combinations of button presses. The Xbox controller already has a crazy number of buttons. Any game that requires me to e.g. press the left stick down while simultaneously pressing the shoulder button is just an instant no. I remember abandoning the latest Doom game for this reason - it was just too much.
> there should be a market for games where I can just jump in, have 30 minutes of fun by myself, and log off
I've been playing Spelunky 2 for most of the last year for precisely this reason. Randomly generated levels, runs that last less than 15 minutes (sometimes seconds!) and gameplay that's simple to pick up but which has considerable depth when you get into it.
Also, why in the MarsHell would you play a first person shooter with a controller ?!
Also, I find this ridiculous and a symptom of bad pacing, but most "competitive" people seem to prefer to skip it entirely : takes only a few minutes with the help of a high level player.
EDIT : as an example, the current «season» (where you restart the whole accumulation game from scratch across all season characters) added an «altar» where you can sacrifice random items to get season-wide character boosts. I though I was going crazy not finding the altar at the described & screenshotted location... it's because it's NOT available in story mode – only in the adventure-(the whole world starts open to you)-mode ! Nobody even thought to point that out : not in the (quite long) official season description, not in the guides that players made !!
If you like BotW you might like A Short Hike, if you like Diablo3 then Hammerwatch (released a year later) could be fun too, etc.
I haven't played a single AAA game since then. Only indies :)
Indies are on a roll, there's one for any genre and gameplay style.
If you like puzzles, you might like Patrick's Parabox (sic), Baba is You. If you like strategy games, try Into the Breach. Mini Metro and Mini Motorways give you a hyper-minimalistic take on the city-building genre. All of these are eminently playable in half-hour slices.
If you're willing to have your mind changed about storytelling, try Return of the Obra Dinn or Hades, or maybe Subnautica.
Are you me?
PS: consider trying Rocket League.
So my current favourite games are 2-4 hour long that tells a good story. Eg Journey, tale of two brothers, slay the princess, Stanley's parable...
It's a castlevania style rogue game, I can turn it on, play for 30-60 mins and turn it off again.
SImple controls, hard, a bit different each time, fun.
That is issue with all witchers imo. I once wanted to play them, but literally after an hour of boring cut scenes I rage quitted.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_therapist
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_therapy