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greenmedic88 on 03 April 2016
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3sexty said:
KingCherry said:

Baby Boomer generation? Crikey! That's from 1946 to what, 1965?? I'd say they are, in general, way out of the equation 51-70 year olds?! That was my whole point, those folk don't seem interested as they weren't brough up on them.

There's no doubt in my mind, that the reason there are so many older gamers is that people have grown up with them, from mainly the mid Eighties onwards. That's 30 years of gaming history drilled into people. I see so many blokes in their thirties now who game, and it increases all the time as they get older. Games are more and more catered to be inclusive of all ages, keeping people involved.

I'm guessing, but the type of person who bu inclination would be a gamer, doesn't necessarily include the casual COD / FIFA GTA types who play nothing else. I reckon they'll probably tire of gaming.

Millenials & Gen X, two very broad age ranges there, I'm straddling both and that cover a 40 year span..

a 51 year old for example would have been around 6 years of age when the famous Atari 2600 came out in 1977 and younger when pong or other earlier consoles came out in the early 70's. So technically they could have grown up with gaming of sorts. Just not as we know it today.

I was riding this assumption with the OP "50 year old gamers" argument although a 50 year old would have been closer to 10 in 1977; still young enough to have been considered having grown up with video games, but not "learned how to use a controller as I was learning to walk" young.

I'd even dial that 1977 year back a bit because there were home consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey in the mid-70s, loosely coinciding with the onset of arcade games. 

The thing is, in the 70s, video games were more of a new fangled fad that sank by the early 80s thanks to Atari management and business decisions. 

I would argue that the first true gaming children's generation was the 2nd gen who grew up with the NES in the mid 80s. Nintendo's licensing and more importantly "quality seal" meant that there were actual standards for games on their platform, understanding full well where Atari went astray. 

This is coming from someone who was in high school during the end of the NES generation, right along the time the 3rd gen opened with the TG-16 and the Genesis, so I started gaming during the first generation as a small child with a Magnavox Odyssey 2000 and later an Atari 2600. The Odyssey was little more than a fancy, expensive gadget, but the Atari 2600 introduced the concept of sharing video game carts and gaming at home with friends as well as receiving video games as birthday and Christmas gifts. 

But I was a part of the consumer base that lead to the video game crash of 1983. I stopped requesting games for the Atari 2600 after Pac-Man and E.T. and there was a decent lull where I wasn't playing console games until after the NES debuted and I didn't actually own one until around 1987. At that point, it became a major hobby rather than just a new toy game.

So the NES generation was really when console video games hit their stride as more of a mainstream activity rather than a curiosity or a trend.

You can think of yourself as being a pioneer (generally, pioneers would be the ones who created the industry and the content rather than those who simply consumed it) for having started gaming in the early to mid 70s, but the reality is, the industry was far thinner than it was until the post NES/Nintendo generation.