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Comment by kyriefh | Hacker News Reader

gaming studios are full of people who are squarely in the target market for the product they're developing. this has downsides but in many ways is a huge edge, so in a sense ageism seems more justifiable in games than elsewhere as a close proxy for audience understanding

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Most people working on games have little input to the game dynamics, but sure have a bias for younger people because they can 'relate' to the market, and nothing to do with being more exploitable!

I believe the reason gaming studios prefer younger employees has more to do with salaries than anything else.

Game dev salaries seem to be really bad compared to the rest of the industry, but so hyped and "cool" that younger people keep fighting over those jobs.

I turned down a job at machine games because of really mediocre compensation compared to what I had before, working at a rather unknown startup.

The average age of a 'gamer' is actually a lot higher than you might think. 35-44 according to this:

https://venturebeat.com/business/esa-ceo-64-of-u-s-adults-ar...

That's older than the median age of a human being. Granted, people don't tend to play games before the age of about 7, but that still seems suspect.

Googling the median age of Americans it looks like it's 38.9 so not that far off the mid-point of that age range!

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/us/census-median-age.html

Why? Elder Millennials and younger GenXers (born late 70s and early 80s) were arguably the first generation to grow up where video games were mainstream, and that's just a little older than that age bracket. I'm in my early forties, and I've enjoyed everything from the original Final Fantasy to Baldur's Gate 3 over the years.

And I'm sure there are folks older than me who picked them up in their 20s and 30s.

I'll probably be a gamer until I die - I see no reason to give it up; I just change my play style.

I keep having this vision of a retirement home full of aging gamers, electronic and TPRGs.

It seems suspect in the sense that we’d expect gaming to be at least as mainstream in the subsequent generation, right? The median age of a gamers should be approaching the median age of the population from below, I’m fine with believing it is pretty close, but how’d it get higher?

When I actually googled to see what the median age of Americans was it's 38.9 which is pretty much in the middle of the quoted age range.

At 58, and playing 'video' games since the late 70s, I'm happily pulling the average age of gamers higher every year. Better than that, at 58 we just started work on our first video game that we have talked about making for over 20 years.

Seems like some definitions need to be clarified here

The measure should be weighted by hours played or dollars spent or something.

Why? To satisfy people’s preconceived notion of what a gamer is?

You can definitely break the industry down deeper by looking at different cohorts which is interesting but doesn’t alter the top line numbers.

I have never heard the use of "gamer" to mean "at least plays games sometimes every now and then".

You can understand though that from a broad industry perspective everyone that plays games is a potential customer and thus interesting as a gamer?

Yes, in the same way I am interesting as a carpenter.

i should make it a point to play games made by old people-- i'd probably like them more.

That sounds like a great reason to hire more older adults. After all, that's always been one of the most difficult groups to market games to.

Younger gamers have time. Older gamers have money.

that's an interesting idea. are games special? does this same idea apply to movies?

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