The gaming industry is growing up. While long ago, video games were deliberately marketed towards children, but as the core audience of games has grown older, the focus of the medium has grown with them.
While there’s no shortage of kids games available on all platforms, and while many smaller games are aimed at a family friendly audience, big budget AAA gamed focus almost exclusively on an older demographic.
Many of the most profitable modern gaming franchises, such as Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, target the first generation of consumers who’ve grown up with the medium. The kids who first slotted quarters into arcade machines or who plugged in tapes and cartridges into home consoles during the 80’s and 90’s are still the industry’s go-to gamer crowd.
It’s important to note, though, that for all the noise and hype which surrounds AAA gaming, the industry as a whole is so much larger. In the modern world, everyone plays games – children invest their pocket money in Toys to Life, while retirees become addicted to Facebook puzzle games and even world leaders sink time into casual games. The gaming industry is large, and caters to a diverse variety of players. Only the AAA studios are quite to obsessed with hounding a single demographic.
Continuing to appeal to such a tiny fraction of the market is, quite simply, bad business for games studios. As technology continues to improve, the development costs for games are increasing, and many studios are still only marketing to the slim eighteen-to-thirty-five male age demographic in an attempt to make back costs.
It’s likely that the primary reason why so many AAA studios focus on older gamers is the perceived danger of reaching out to others. The so-called ‘hardcore’ market of male adults is proven and tested. Studios know what these gamers want and what they’re willing to pay in order to get it, and that means they can be sure their games will sell well. The more these studio’s misconceptions about their audience are ingrained, the less willing they are to branch out with their games’ content and marketing techniques.
Male adult gamers, though, are far from the only customers who’ll buy consoles. Back in 2006, Nintendo adopted an unusual sales tactic: instead of directly marketing towards young men, they began to market to previously untapped demographics, featuring men and women of all ages in their marketing imagery.
While other factors were likely involved, Nintendo’s ‘Touch! Generations’ marketing campaign was at least partially responsible for the record sales of the Wii and DS consoles. Nintendo reached out to gamers of all ages, and saw a massive boost to their sales as a result.
Plenty of games currently on the market have proven that the younger generation of gamers is more than willing to invest in hardware – the Toys to Life games such as Skylanders and Lego Dimension can hardly be considered cheap, and yet many young gamers have found ways to afford the necessary hardware.
It’s also worth noting that of the twenty bestselling games of all time, only two have an ESRB Mature rating: Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the seventeenth and eighteenth bestsellers respectively. Both of these games only barely sold more copies than Brain Age, a Nintendo DS game that was marketed primarily at the elderly.
Perhaps part of the problem simply comes down to the culture within games studios. Current games developers grew up playing videogames, and are producing games that they themselves would enjoy playing.
All of this leads to another problem that gaming faces: the stagnation of ideas.
With all games aiming for the same demographic, producing similar content so as not to be labelled childish, a lot of big studio games end up feeling very similar. This has led to the gaming clichés which are very apparent with many titles on the market today: game protagonists are always large, tough, manly men with big weapons and crude vocabularies. Many First-Person Shooters are more or less interchangeable to those who aren’t already deeply invested in the culture surrounding AAA games.
While many of these games are well thought out and developed, it’s difficult to justify quite how many similar titles there are on the market. As AAA games continue to appeal to a single demographic, gamers outside of the target audience find it increasingly difficult to break into the culture surrounding these games, and unless a gamer enjoys violent games, they’re left feeling alienated by gaming in general.
It’s worth noting the relative diversity present in both indie games and in kids games, compared with modern AAA titles. Recent years have been games such as Minecraft, Angry Birds, Subway Surfer, Skylanders and Mario Kart stealing the attention of children worldwide, each offering different aesthetics and gameplay styles.
If big budget studio games continue to target the narrow adult male gamer demographic, the next few years will likely see greater homogeny between titles, and a shrinking growth for the AAA games market as fewer and fewer of the rising generation of gamers feel capable of breaking into modern gaming.
If big budget games studios can’t hook younger gamers, they may find themselves being replaced by companies who understand the rising generation and who can give them what they want.