An Older Demographic May Soon Dominate Gaming

An article from last week runs down the new mass audience for gaming among families, women and older people. The importance of the mass audience in gaming's spectacular growth is seen most clearly in the success of Nintendo's Wii, which is far outselling its more technically advanced hardware competitors, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and PlayStation 3 from Sony. Wii Play was the No. 2-selling game of last year even though it received an abysmal score of 58 out of 100 at Metacritic, which aggregates reviews. The Times says that as video games become more popular hard-core gamers are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience. 'Paradoxically, at a moment when technology allows designers to create ever more complex and realistic single-player fantasies, the growth in the now $18 billion gaming market is in simple, user-friendly experiences that families and friends can enjoy together.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl.../02/12/1449228

Personally, this doesn't bother me, since along with RPGs and fighting games, I tend to like casual gamer-oriented games quite a bit, plus an older market means more literature collections and so on for portable game devices, and that gets a big thumbs-up from me.