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Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

Seems like some definitions need to be clarified here

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