The average age of Nintendo console owners increased each generation

[WereKitten]

@Rol: your suggested implication doesn't hold.

1) Averages are too dumb a reduction of information. Averages could very well mean that half of GC owner were 22 and the other half were 24, while on the Wii that could be two thirds 6 years old and one third of 75. The distributions shown by Nintendo in one of their reports make more sense.

2) I'm not still clear on who is an "owner" in a family that has a Wii. Do they all count to the age average even if only the kids use it regularly and the parents and grampa used it twice the first month they owned it? Do we know if the methodology used for the GC average is the same as the the one used lately for the Wii one?

Basically, you can't draw any significant conclusions from those two numbers, and in that sense the implication doesn't hold.

That said, I'm sure that Nintendo owners' average age increased since the NES/SNES days because a) the Nintendo core crowd grew up and b) console owners as a general category had such an increase as the market expanded way beyond the old-school niche. The PS1 is probably the console that popularized console gaming in this wider and older market.

PS: I loved Eternal Darkness but I'd be incredibly surprised if it managed to draw enough people to the platform to actually alter the average age of the GC owners by even a hundredth of a year.