93% of Steam Users Born on January 1st | Hacker News Reader

93% of Steam Users Born on January 1st

thenobleeskimo.com

23 pointsbound00816 comments

Force users to provide unnecessary data, get crap. The sad thing is that so many people still don't get it. And it's not just random people, it's those who are supposed to know better.

Regards,

bob@bob.com, aged 65-99, top executive position in steel industry, sole maker of all purchasing decisions, yearly budget 5mio-20mio USD.

The product of yet another law that looks good on paper and achieves nothing.

I would assume it's because that's the first option in the dropdown and people just change the year. I know I do that all the time whenever it's part of the signup process.

I've been born on Jan 1 1970 on more sites than I can count. A different meaning of Zero-day!

Is this serious article or belong to ONION category? Clicking the provided steam link in TFA will only show Steam app store main page.

I hope this is not a serious article. They seriously think people take their time to fill legit birthday dates online? 1st January is usually default. The thing people usually pick randomly is the year since the default is usually too young.

The article is a parody.

Um, what about the possibility that Jan 1 is the default and 92% of people are too lazy to switch their real birthdate.

we have even hired some outside help to determine what the causes are.

I think it's obvious that Gabe is being pretty sarcastic.

Or the article is tongue-in-cheek and Gabe never said any of those things.

I think it's obvious you assume everyone knows Gabe's personality. I for one only heard his name in news. Never seen his picture, read his interviews, etc.

Not really an assumption that you would understand his personality.

Considering he created and runs an incredibly successful game development and distribution company who's target market is people under 25 years old it's pretty reasonable to asssume that he has half a clue about his target market.

It is funny that most people think that gamers are under 25 years old. In fact, the average gamer age in the US was, in 2010, 34 years old. And only 25% of them were under 18. Those numbers are from a 2010 study from Entertainment Software Association (www.theesa.com), you can find it there. Another fact is that gamers have been playing games on average for at 12 years.

comScore also released an announcement a while ago saying that gamers actually represent all markets segments, showing the potential of in-game advertising (which has been growing both in revenue and number of advertising in the past years).

So Gabe's target market should be a very broad one not only gamers "under 25 years old", specially since his main product is a platform (Steam).

A good friend of mine was actually born January 1st. "Clever" site owners should refrain from added smartarse JS alerts when you submit using the defaults. There are lots of people born exactly then. Either drop the requirement or allow people to use it!

Also, apparently 18,904,110 + 16,114,110 = 27,900,000 and not 35,018,210.

I'd be curious as to the distribution of birthdays if January 1 was removed. Anyone have a site with a similar age verification measure they could check this on? Even anecdotally would be nice.

Also, I still forget that to be over 18 I no longer have to fill a fake date before my actual birth date. Always go to the 1960s...

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