One reader imagines a two-track video game industry, where the majority of console games are made for adults rather than young gamers.
There's been a lot of talk lately about the lack of growth in the console business. Roughly as many people are playing it now as have been playing since the PlayStation 2 era, with the real peak being the Wii era. But there's been a lot going on lately, and the entire video game industry has been turned upside down, as if some invisible signal had arrived (yes, it was probably the Christmas hardware sales) Sho).
I don't know what's going on and I think the problem lies with the publisher as well. Although it's hard to imagine that all this happening just a few months after his acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Xbox is a coincidence. Many said it would unbalance the entire gaming industry, and it looks like that's exactly what's happening.
Again, many of these issues seem to be related to things that have been obvious for a very long time. So…the Wii era is over 10 years old. But what I really want to talk about is one of the main conclusions that analysts have drawn from this. It's that young people aren't interested in consoles anymore, so their demographic is aging.
The situation is, they haven't published any numbers to back this up, but it's implied that it's based on unpublished data, but clearly young people (those up to around 25 years of age) are less likely to use consoles or consoles. It means he's not interested. Instead of traditional console gaming, you want to play games on mobile or at most on PC.
This seems believable enough, but I think we all know plenty of relatives and perhaps our own children who dispute this, so I don't think this is really a blanket statement. I don't know if I can say that. I know a lot of people my age (38) who don't play video games, but does that mean all middle-aged people don't like video games? No, obviously not.
That's obviously not because there's been research showing that the console market is shifting towards older people, and even if young people play on consoles and play console-style games, it's not because of live service titles or other This is due to the idea that it is multiplayer only. game.
Apparently kids don't like single player, which doesn't necessarily match my experience either. But whether it's true or not doesn't really matter as long as publishers act on that information.
It certainly helps explain the obsession with live service games if publishers consider them not only the golden goose, but the only thing young gamers like. I think they also think that kids are more likely to waste money on pointless cosmetics and the like, which is probably true.
The important question for me, and I'm not sure if it's been asked, is: Will these people never enjoy console gaming, or will they themselves transition to console gaming as they get older? . There are a lot of things now that I didn't enjoy when I was younger, and that doesn't even take into account that your arcade skills diminish as you get older. Over time, multiplayer games lose their appeal.
What I want now is a distinction between games aimed at younger and older players that hasn't existed before. Of course, some games appeal to certain types of people, but I think the gaming industry could go in pretty much two directions, and I think that's a good idea. You can run all your microtransaction-filled live service games on one side, and single-player or narrative-driven games on the other.
Any excuse to specifically target older gamers is welcome. I think some games do this anyway, but most of the marketing is definitely aimed at younger players (even though most of the big budget games are 18+). Knowing that it's intentionally targeting older players in terms of the assumed knowledge of previous games and other media, the willingness to not want 100% action, and it doesn't have to be 200 hours. , I think many games will be better. length.
If traditional video games are only aimed at old people from now on, I'm all for it. Once that happens, I think the storytelling will be better, the gameplay more complex, and hopefully without the microtransactions and other nonsense aimed at kids borrowing their parents' credit cards.
Of course, there's also the option for companies to just create live services and mobile games and nothing else, but that seems like a realistic possibility at this point. But I feel we need to be optimistic and hope that some good comes from all of this.
Written by reader Tom Meadows
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