They want to expand the public's perception of who a gamer is, to make people feel more comfortable identifying as a gamer. If you included a sweaty CSGO player farming loot boxes with bloodshot eyes at 3am, that doesn't give you a new market. They're already going to buy.
Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.
(And yes, I know why you're asking and what answer you're looking for.)
It's a more nuanced situation than people generally want to accept.
>Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.
This is the most simple and probably accurate explanation. Companies like to make money, untapped markets look like money.
The problem is that then, the current audience, who is primarily male, can raise concerns about the marketing not catering to them anymore.
There's a political arm who doesn't like that at all, and they will not only attempt to enforce collective delusion to dismiss the whole thing (what do you mean? everybody plays videogames, playerbase is split 50/50 pretty much!), but invalidate the very idea that a primarily male audience can have grievances about being catered to.
This makes them look insane and alienates the original audience politically speaking, and ironically, makes the original audience look bigoted, which puts consumers off.
This dance has been going on for like a decade and a half at this point and it's only recently that signs of it dying down have started to show. I can only hope.
IMHO there isn't a realistic "typical gamer stereotype" anymore
sure you can pick any of the past stereotypes and will find people like that, even many, but it's not "most" or even "a slim majority"
Games, and with that Steam, have spread through all of society and Steam is the most wide spread platform for it.
So whatever anecdotal data you have based on your local environments selection bias is probably not "overall representative", just a slice of one of the many many different kinds of people playing games bought from steam.
I used to play the PS3 version lol, good times. I've actually just downloaded it last week to run it in an emulator. So nostalgic with the old menu, old weapons, old maps etc. (only works offline against but but still fun)
I'd say about half of Steam players aren't male. The "video games are for boys" thing is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy because anyone who believes that will obviously not play with a woman.
I think that it's true that games are definitely being played by both males and females today, but I think that statistics is that mobile games skew female, and PC games skew male.
the comment you replied to is a homophobic dogwhistle.
The tech sector is rife with blatant homophobia, racism, and a false sense of intellectual superiority. Hacker News is an excellent cross section of the typical techbro culture.
People are not vectors of real-valued numbers, and "mean person" is not a coherent concept. Does the average person have half a penis and half a vagina? Is their skin a tan-ish mocha brown? Do they have slightly but not really curly hair that is long in some parts and short in others? Incomplete epicanthic folds?
Any representation of people will be a randomly chosen sample, and not an attempt to visualize the blending of all people from the sample.
The average steam user is a mid twenties straight male. The average steam user in USA is a mid twenties straight white male. The average steam user nowhere on earth is anything resembling these marketed demographics
Go on Steam, look at the most played games right now, look at the demographics for those games.
Or pick some player profiles at random, count how many girls vs guys you find (very easy to tell with high accuracy just by looking at the games they play, yes there are exceptions but they're actually quite rare, I promise you can get >90% accuracy after you do a few).
Steam user base is at least 3/4 male by user count, probably even more by play time.
Maybe, due to the budget specs, they figure the “cozy gamer” demographic will be their sweet spot. Hence the Stardew Valley video and Cuphead with its retro/nostalgic graphics. The people they showed do seem like they’d fall into that demographic, which would be less concerned with their FPS counts and playing games that don’t stress the system as much, generally speaking.
That is confusing. The Nintendo switch is half the price, and plays all of those games. Why would someone want to buy the more expensive Steam machine just to play 2d pixel art games?
Obviously when they make an ad they'll hire actors and show whoever they want, because it makes their product look good, or it aligns more with the image they want to project, or whatever. That is fine.
My comment was because the thread went down the topic of what the actual player base of Steam is like and whether the ad was reflective of that. I just pointed out that it's very obviously not reflective because it's easy to tell what the actual user base is like just from public stats and extrapolating a bit, even being very conservative, it's mainly guys.
> look at the most played games right now, look at the demographics for those games.
Doesn't Steam have a very long tail? Most played might not be very representative.
Maybe young men are just boring and all play mostly just a few games, while majority of players that are more diverse have their interests spread more evenly across others?
Cool story. Obviously wrong. You only need to go on steamdb and use two brain cells:
Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, PUBG and Apex Legends are almost 50% of the active players on any given day. They're PVP games, and their playerbase is >=90% male (it's obvious to anyone who has played them but you don't need to take my word for it, it's easy to verify). So the only way for what you say to be true would be for all other games on Steam to not by played by guys at all, which is not the case cause the "long tail" of Steam is Path of Exile, EA Sports, Forza Horzion, Cyberpunk, Destiny, etc.
Yes, there are other games that have a more balanced player base. There's Stardew Valley and others like that. Just go look at their player numbers, they're dwarfed by the most played. Steam player base skews massively to guys, anyone who things otherwise is wrong, and if the person that I was replying to doesn't see the same stats it's obvious that they're just in a bubble.
I'm not clearing up confusion, I'm letting you know it's pretty easy for everybody to see that you're wrong. If you want to continue being wrong just because the method used doesn't meet your very rigorous standards, suit yourself. Emperor's new clothes and all that.
Which part? Are you actually claiming that in your experience steam gamers are mostly black, mostly gay, mostly women, or what? Because that would be a shocking statistic we'd probably know about given the general population demographics of race/orientation, and general interaction with the female sex in real life.
Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.
(And yes, I know why you're asking and what answer you're looking for.)