Yeah those people are definetly not a realistic sample of the average Steam user. I wonder why they chose them in particular.
Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.
(And yes, I know why you're asking and what answer you're looking for.)
>Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.
This is the most simple and probably accurate explanation. Companies like to make money, untapped markets look like money.
The problem is that then, the current audience, who is primarily male, can raise concerns about the marketing not catering to them anymore.
There's a political arm who doesn't like that at all, and they will not only attempt to enforce collective delusion to dismiss the whole thing (what do you mean? everybody plays videogames, playerbase is split 50/50 pretty much!), but invalidate the very idea that a primarily male audience can have grievances about being catered to.
This makes them look insane and alienates the original audience politically speaking, and ironically, makes the original audience look bigoted, which puts consumers off.
This dance has been going on for like a decade and a half at this point and it's only recently that signs of it dying down have started to show. I can only hope.
IMHO there isn't a realistic "typical gamer stereotype" anymore
sure you can pick any of the past stereotypes and will find people like that, even many, but it's not "most" or even "a slim majority"
Games, and with that Steam, have spread through all of society and Steam is the most wide spread platform for it.
So whatever anecdotal data you have based on your local environments selection bias is probably not "overall representative", just a slice of one of the many many different kinds of people playing games bought from steam.
Unfortunately I usually meet gopnik and niño rata in Dota and CSGO and not typical young nerds from Seattle
It's not my point, but I don't think you're giving a strong rebuttal either.
92% identify as male, 7% female.
https://sqmagazine.co.uk/steam-statistics/
I think that it's true that games are definitely being played by both males and females today, but I think that statistics is that mobile games skew female, and PC games skew male.
A female share of around 40-48% has held steady in this report since around 2007.
Quantic Foundry's research largely backs that women prefer more casual-genre games like match 3, with a mobile bent that wouldn't show up in Steam data: https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre...
But they also show a heavy preference for third-person MMOs that are also less likely to show up in Steam data: https://quanticfoundry.com/2023/01/27/perspective/
The tech sector is rife with blatant homophobia, racism, and a false sense of intellectual superiority. Hacker News is an excellent cross section of the typical techbro culture.
People are not vectors of real-valued numbers, and "mean person" is not a coherent concept. Does the average person have half a penis and half a vagina? Is their skin a tan-ish mocha brown? Do they have slightly but not really curly hair that is long in some parts and short in others? Incomplete epicanthic folds?
Any representation of people will be a randomly chosen sample, and not an attempt to visualize the blending of all people from the sample.
I'm very curious what you and others think the average Steam user really looks like.
Or pick some player profiles at random, count how many girls vs guys you find (very easy to tell with high accuracy just by looking at the games they play, yes there are exceptions but they're actually quite rare, I promise you can get >90% accuracy after you do a few).
Steam user base is at least 3/4 male by user count, probably even more by play time.
In any case, I don't think "not wanting to make assumptions about people based on little to no information" really counts as "very rigorous standards".
Anyway, I don't particularly care about discussing with you because you obviously enjoy your head buried in the sand, so I'll leave you to it. I just wanted to make sure anyone who ends on this thread can see that just with some quick napkin numbers it's trivial to estimate, with pretty good confidence, what should already be obvious to anyone who has ever been on Steam: that it's a sausage fest.
My comment was because the thread went down the topic of what the actual player base of Steam is like and whether the ad was reflective of that. I just pointed out that it's very obviously not reflective because it's easy to tell what the actual user base is like just from public stats and extrapolating a bit, even being very conservative, it's mainly guys.
Doesn't Steam have a very long tail? Most played might not be very representative.
Maybe young men are just boring and all play mostly just a few games, while majority of players that are more diverse have their interests spread more evenly across others?
Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, PUBG and Apex Legends are almost 50% of the active players on any given day. They're PVP games, and their playerbase is >=90% male (it's obvious to anyone who has played them but you don't need to take my word for it, it's easy to verify). So the only way for what you say to be true would be for all other games on Steam to not by played by guys at all, which is not the case cause the "long tail" of Steam is Path of Exile, EA Sports, Forza Horzion, Cyberpunk, Destiny, etc.
Yes, there are other games that have a more balanced player base. There's Stardew Valley and others like that. Just go look at their player numbers, they're dwarfed by the most played. Steam player base skews massively to guys, anyone who things otherwise is wrong, and if the person that I was replying to doesn't see the same stats it's obvious that they're just in a bubble.
Counter-Strike 2 759,021
Dota 2 492,145
TBH: Task Bar Hero 465,078
PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS 385,269
MECCHA CHAMELEON 147,052
Bongo Cat 144,556
Apex Legends 122,102
Delta Force 104,791
Path of Exile 2 102,706
Wallpaper Engine 96,076
It looks more like 20% of all players, not over 50% if we look at first 10 games and about 25% when we look at top 20.
Various research on gamer demographics repeatedly shows that average gamer is pushing 40 and the gender split is pretty even. Steam can't be that far off.