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Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

this comment is wrong on multiple levels

- this reduces fortnite’s audience to 12 year olds. the average age of a fortnite player is an adult

- fortnite custom mods / modes are nearly all developed by adults (the people who will write in this language)

- verse is designed to be used more widely than just fortnite in other games by other game develoment professionals (that are nearly all adults)

i don’t understand how anyone can see a game that makes billions each year and think “12 year olds” are the driving force. video games are not just for teenagers and adults are the primary revenue streams because they have the disposable income

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Average age is a pretty bad metric for most things because “not adult but still engaged in society” is a pretty narrow band. If you have five 14-year-olds and one 40-year-old, the average age is over 18 (i.e., an adult) even though 83% of that group are not adults.

This is a quote from the article,

"I’m really excited that there will be 12-year-olds being introduced to programming by making Fortnite islands, using Verse and functional programming."

to which GP's comment is a valid response:

"It doesn't really look like the kind of thing I'd design for 12-year-olds to use?"

While one can agree or disagree, your response in that context is not correct:

"This reduces fortnite’s audience to 12 year olds."

Not at all. The discussion was about 12 year old players, not all players.

I'm not necessarily saying you are wrong here in the case of fortnite, but do you have data to back up that the average fortnite player is an adult? It seems like in general it tends to be wildly more popular with younger people, generally kids and teens - although i don't have data for this either, just based off what I've personally seen.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/fortnite-statistics/

62% of Fortnite players are 18-24

I have no data but anecdotes. I'm in my 40s and whenever I played squads, trios, or duos, I was playing with people in their 20s or 30s. Also, it's one of those rare online games where you can queue in at 3am or in the middle of a school day and almost instantly get into a game, and it's a game requiring 100 people per match. Other online games I've gotten into, 15 player games, essentially died out late at night or during schooldays. Fortnite doesn't.

Yes, there are a lot of kids playing it, and it's very popular with them. But there's also a huge audience of adults.

The composition of your matches will vary wildly based on ranking and geography so it's hard to say based on experience in-game

Epic doesn't release specific numbers but they say in the T&C for creative that the content should appeal to 15-25 year olds I believe

Epic pads out the real players (or lack thereof) with bots

My anecdata, my teenagers won't play it, despite liking it [privately], because it's for "little kids" -- by which they mean Primary School (7-11yo) children.

They are ridiculously sensitive to their perceived age groups for games.

this comment is wrong on multiple levels :)

1. What does revenue have to do with target audience age? Roblox makes billions, right?

2. The only people I know that play fortnite are younger than 15.

3. "fortnite custom mods / modes are nearly all developed by adults" -> because the language is too difficult for new programmers?

4. "verse is designed to be used more widely than just fortnite" -> so is Lua and Python.

The game acts like it is designed for kids. It follows all the obnoxious gen Z trends, everything is in superbright colors, and speaks their design language. Hard to imagine that its userbase isn't mostly kids.

That's because attracting kids to your game means they'll stick around long enough to afford spending on it.

Kids' TV shows tend to have secondary audiences of their parents. I think this wouldn't apply to games as much but maybe there's some of that.

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