Video games are only for old people now and I'm glad

A reader envisages a two-track video games industry where the majority of console games are made for adults and not younger gamers.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how the console business isn’t growing. That roughly the same number of people are playing them now as they have since the days of the PlayStation 2, with the actual peak being in the Wii era. But then there’s a lot of talk about many things lately, with the entire video games industry turning itself upside down as if at some unseen signal (okay, it was probably Christmas hardware sales).

I don’t know what’s going on and I think the problem is neither do publishers. Although I can’t imagine that all this happening just months after Xbox’s purchase of Activision Blizzard is a coincidence. Many said it would unbalance the whole games industry and that seems to be exactly what’s happening.

Then again, many of these issues seem to relate to things that have been obvious for a very long time. I mean… the Wii era was over a decade ago now. But what I really want to talk about is one of the main conclusions that analysts are taking from this: that young people aren’t interested in consoles anymore and so the demographics for them are getting older.

The situation is – and they didn’t release any figures to back this up, but it’s implied to be based on data that hasn’t been made public – that apparently youngsters (anyone up to around 25) aren’t interested in consoles and traditional console games and would rather game on their mobile or, at most, a PC.

This seems believable enough but I’m sure we all know plenty of relatives, and perhaps our own children, who refute this, so I’m not sure whether it’s really something you can say as a blanket statement. I know plenty of people my age (38) who don’t play video games, but does that mean that all middle-aged people don’t like them? No, clearly not.

Clearly not because the findings were that the console market was shifting towards older people, with the idea being that if younger people do play on a console, or play a console style game, it’ll only be for a live service title or other multiplayer game.

Apparently, younglings don’t like single-player which, again, doesn’t necessarily match with my experiences. But whether it’s true or not it doesn’t really matter, if that’s the information that publishers are going to act on.

Fortnite on mobile — Only for the young? (Picture: Getty Images)

What I would hope to see now is a division between games aimed at younger and older players, that hasn’t really existed before. Obviously, some games appeal to certain kinds of people but I think we could be looking at almost a two-track games industry, and I think that would be a good idea. You can have all the microtransaction-filled live service games on one side and then single-player and narrative driven games on the other.

I’d welcome the excuse to specifically target older gamers. I assume some games do this anyway but most marketing is definitely aimed at younger players (even though most big budget games are 18-rated). I feel many games would be better if they knew they were purposefully aiming at older players, in terms of the knowledge they can assume about previous games and other media, the willingness not to be 100% action, and the need not to be 200 hours long.

If traditional video games are only going to be aimed at old people from now on, I welcome it. If that happens, I feel we could get much better storytelling, more complex gameplay, and hopefully no microtransactions and other nonsense that is aimed at kids borrowing their parent’s credit card.

Of course, the alternative is that companies just make live service and mobile games and nothing else, which at the moment is seeming like a real possibility. But I feel we’ve got to be optimistic and hope that some good will come of all this.

By reader Tom Meadows