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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

    The 50+ years old video game market is tiny

I know this wasn't your main point, but this is very much not the case (source: have worked in games for 13 years).

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.

I feel like everything you said remains true if you remove 50 year old. I.e it’s a truth about the whole gaming market.

Perhaps the issue is just segmenting by age vs device/game type

    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.

Just curious which "dated" FPS you're playing.

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.

Lol, when you said "dated", I thought something pre-2001...

Same here. Was really hoping to find an old persons club where I could relive my memories of playing Duke Nukem 3D via modem :)

Urban Terror used to scratch this sort of itch for many.

Low gravity CTF in Urban Terror was the best. So many good maps where the right jump, curve, and slide could be done from flag to flag. So satisfying.

I have fond memories of running Platoons in Planetside 2. The semi persistent world dynamics, combined with squads and then squads being able to firm platoons, and the map marker system. All of it felt very unique and polished, and not something I've seen replicated elsewhere. I was sad when it started to die out.

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

[1] https://www.splashdamage.com/games/wolfenstein-enemy-territo... [2] https://www.etlegacy.com/

ET is still alive?! How active is it nowadays?

Yep! I play on the FA and Team Muppet servers, and at peak times during the day the server will be almost full (60 players).

But, that's kinda it, I doubt there are ever more than 1k people online at a time. But those same people have millions of XP (I actually have a PR open on the client ATM to abbreviate the XP in the scoreboard, which I think we finally need after 20 years lol)

If you play, make sure you use the etlegacy client, it is backwards compatible with many fixes/improvements.

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