Back in February, MachineGames head Jerk Gustafsson emphasised to GamesIndustry.biz that the video games market still has room to grow. “I am 54 years old now,” he said, “and I grew up with games – but I think I was also the first generation that grew up with games. So when I’m going into retirement, when I’m 70 years old, that should be the peak. That should be the peak of our install base, that should be the peak of people that have actually grown up playing games on a daily basis.”
Yet the games industry has been slow to serve the growing ranks of grey gamers. “You have more and more players that are older… maybe 40, 50, 60 years old,” said Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at Newzoo, in the “State of the Industry 2026” talk at last week’s Nordic Game conference. “And if they are retired, they have even more money – but nobody’s making games for the retired people.”
It’s well known that countries such as the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and many places in Western Europe have ageing populations. According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, around 13% of the UK population was aged 65 or over in 1972. That leapt up to 19% in 2022, and is projected to rise to 27% by 2072.
Importantly, these older people want to play video games. The analyst firm Ampere Analysis told GamesIndustry.biz that in the UK, there were 6.62 million gamers aged 55 or over in 2025. That figure is projected to rise to 7.32 million by 2031. And across Western Europe as a whole, there were 51.89 million gamers aged 55+ in 2025, a figure that’s set to rise to 56.9 million by 2031.
Analyst Joost van Dreunen, the CEO of Aldora and former head of SuperData, tells GamesIndustry.biz that developers need to change their thinking to focus on an older audience.
“Developers have been ignoring older gamers for the same reason it took them decades to discover women,” he says. “The industry has spent 40 years chasing the same narrowly defined audience because it was the safest bet, until everyone was chasing it. Imagine if Hollywood only made movies for 18-year-old men. That’s roughly the bet games have been making.
“The opportunity is substantial. The 40+ segment in the US is on track to grow from $19 billion in 2022 to $43 billion by 2030, a 132% expansion at a moment when the rest of the industry is shrinking. These are players with the most disposable income, the longest gaming literacy, and the highest brand loyalty. They are also the least visible in the industry’s dashboards because the metrics were built around younger players who compete frequently. Older lifelong gamers don’t, but they keep playing, and they keep spending.
“What needs to change is the industry’s mindset. An entire generation has now grown up playing video games and is ageing into a life stage where they have time, money, and the desire to keep playing. The first publishers to actually see this player will capture a structural advantage. The rest will arrive 10 years late, exactly like they did with women.”
Catering for the older crowd
Veteran analyst Matthew Ball, who was installed as Xbox’s new chief strategy officer last month, told The Games Business back in February that the industry isn’t doing a good job of engaging older players outside of casual mobile games.
“We are definitely losing that cohort,” he said. He suspects that older gamers are likely to take big breaks between play sessions, and part of the issue is that games generally aren’t good at reorienting players when they come back after a break. “There is a mismatch between the general investment in tutorials for the first few minutes, relative to where actually the player loss happens,” Ball said.
“Most games don’t lose players after 30 minutes, they lose them much later. You put the controller down and you don’t come back. And that’s partly because the map has expanded, the tools have expanded. You’re like, ‘holy crap, the skill tree, what did I have to prioritise?’ That, I suspect, is going to be a lot more important for that older game demo. Partly because, when there’s user testing, it’s usually not asking: ‘how hard is boss nine for a 58-year-old who hasn’t touched a controller in over two weeks?'”
But how will the older crowd play games? “When we ask, ‘What will people be playing next year?’, we’re perhaps asking the wrong question,” says Larry Kuperman, who was vice president of business development at remake specialists Nightdive Studios until retiring in March. “I think the question that should come up first is: ‘What will we be playing it on?'”
He reckons it’s unlikely that grey gamers will be playing on heavily specced-out PCs or next-generation consoles (especially given the huge hardware price rises we’ve seen of late). “If you look at the types of games that people can play on ordinary machines, on the kind of machine that grandma and grandpa have at home that still has AOL dial-up – I shouldn’t say that, but close – but if you look at that, there are really two categories that are going to benefit.”
One is games like Roblox, which run on low-powered devices and are essentially platforms in themselves. “I don’t see them penetrating into that demographic,” says Kuperman. “But that brings you down to other categories that have been growing, like cosy games, casual games, and retro. And retro has an advantage in that audience in that you don’t need the latest [computer].”
He also thinks there’s an opportunity to rekindle brands or IPs that appeal to an older demographic, giving the examples of Nightdive’s remasters of Turok, Blood, and Star Wars: Dark Forces. “These are brands that will resonate with that community. I don’t want to say that if you say to somebody over 65, ‘Oh, it’s a souls-like’, they won’t understand what you’re talking about, but if you mention Star Wars, they go, ‘Yes, I know that, I know that brand’.”
Come back to what you know
Andrew Byatt, CEO of Blaze Entertainment, the makers of the retro-focused Evercade console family, says that a lot of the company’s customers are returning to gaming after a long time away. “We find there’s a lot of lapsed gamers,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz. “They really want to re-experience stuff that they did when they were younger.”
He thinks this group is underserved. “If all developers are focusing on these huge cinematic experiences, and they’re aiming at teenagers and [people in their] early 20s, that kind of age group, then I think they are missing a trick.”
He adds that in addition to their in-built brand recognition, retro games tend to have an advantage for the older crowd in terms of their relative brevity when compared with modern titles. Older players might have more disposable income, he says, “but they may have less time. They’ve got busy jobs and everything else. And actually these retro experiences are good for that.”
Like Kuperman, he reckons the older generation might not necessarily be rushing out to buy expensive gaming hardware, which is why Blaze offers affordable, entry-level devices in the form of the self-contained Super Pocket handhelds. “I think that’s important for this crowd,” he says, “because they might not be super-committed, hardcore gamers.”
Importantly, he thinks there’s a missed opportunity when it comes to making gaming’s rich back catalogue more widely available. “I’ve always had a bit of a frustration with the difference between gaming and music and film,” Byatt says. “Music and film is so well curated and accessible, and you can find almost everything from every year using different services… And I think gaming just hasn’t really done that.”
Yet Byatt emphasises that retro games aren’t the only way to tempt the older crowd – there’s also room for new developers. “Retro is obviously a natural fit for these types of games, but we do have modern retro as well. We publish stuff from people developing for old systems that are still doing that today, and we also have some indie stuff, which is very retro themed. But I think that there is certainly a growing market – and they’ve got more money.”
Of note, the kinds of marketing that appeal to the younger demographic, like viral TikTok campaigns and glitzy video showcases, might not necessarily cut through to older audiences. “Email is still the most powerful marketing tool for us,” says Byatt. “Our email list is gold. It’s how we reach our customers. It’s more powerful than our social media channels.”
No twitch shooters
Jack Emmert, who rejoined MMO maker Cryptic Studios as CEO earlier this year, thinks there’s a huge opportunity to target older gamers. “Give me a 50 year old every day over a teen,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz. “The 50 year old has disposable income. The 50 year old is coming to a point when they have time, they want their childhood back.”
“I’m 57 and I still game. I’m going to game in 10 years, and probably in another 10 years.” But he thinks that the types of games he will play will change as he gets older – and games will have to be designed to accommodate the abilities and desires of older players.
“I can’t do twitch games for more than 30 minutes at a time, because my hands hurt,” Emmert says. “That means that when I’m designing games, I’m going to be thinking about that. And I’m going to be thinking about, ‘Well, what does a 60 year old want to play? What moment in the past do they want to recapture?’ And that, to me, is vital.”
Perhaps ironically, the fast-paced 1980s arcade games that have big appeal to players who remember them from their youth are also some of the most difficult for them to play. But Emmert points out there are plenty of retro titles that don’t require fast reflexes. “That’s where the old-style RPGs are great, like Baldur’s Gate.”
“Give me a 50 year old every day over a teen. The 50 year old has disposable income”
Jack Emmert
Yet when it comes to accommodating the needs of older players, Emmert thinks the biggest thing that’s holding the industry back is that there are so few game designers in the 50-plus age bracket. “There are no elder statesmen. And I think this has hurt the industry tremendously. We lose tons of experience constantly, because gaming is always focused into a younger demographic… And I don’t know whether they consciously do it, or it’s subconscious, but it’s just a fact.”
Emmert thinks that because the majority of people making games are young themselves, they don’t necessarily think of the older audience when making them. “It’s that simple,” he says, adding that games marketing is overwhelmingly aimed at the younger generation.
“Give me those 60 year olds who watched Star Trek the original series,” he concludes. “Come on down, play Star Trek Online with me.”
