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 don't think the data shows what you think it shows.
It looks more like 20% of all players, not over 50% if we look at first 10 games and about 25% when we look at top 20.
Various research on gamer demographics repeatedly shows that average gamer is pushing 40 and the gender split is pretty even. Steam can't be that far off.
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.
It's just a bit strange how 'everybody' doesn't seem to include me - based on my own experiences gaming over 20 years not lining up with any of this silliness - as well as others in this thread.
In any case, I don't think "not wanting to make assumptions about people based on little to no information" really counts as "very rigorous standards".
Top 5 games on steam alone account for 50% of the player base, their player base estimations are (as per Google) 4-9% female for the most played (Counter-Strike), 3.5-6% for the second one, <15% the third, ~25% fourth, ~10% fifth. Of the other games in the top 100 about 75% are other equally male-skewed games, and that makes for more than 90% of all players. You might not want to make assumptions based on that "little to no information", but I'm more than happy to, because it's obvious. Your 20 years might not line up with that, my friends list does not align with that either. But that doesn't change the very obvious reality that Steam is mostly guys.
Anyway, I don't particularly care about discussing with you because you obviously enjoy your head buried in the sand, so I'll leave you to it. I just wanted to make sure anyone who ends on this thread can see that just with some quick napkin numbers it's trivial to estimate, with pretty good confidence, what should already be obvious to anyone who has ever been on Steam: that it's a sausage fest.
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.