Why older gamers could be the key to saving the games industry
With layoffs and studio closures coming amid revenue drops, the games industry is in crisis. At a time when the industry is looking to grow, an initiative called Games for Life has the answer: older gamers.
On Nov. 11, 2011, millions of people discovered a whole new world.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a fantasy role-playing game, or RPG, years in the making from videogame maker Bethesda Studios, had just hit shelves. Within two days, 3.4 million people were exploring the snowcapped mountains in the fictional land of Skyrim, crawling through its deepest dungeons, forging alliances with warring factions and slaying dragons.
Kent Neveu was among the many gamers who became obsessed with Bethesda’s now-seminal RPG and its signature blend of freeform exploration and roleplaying. But not many can say they hit the roads of Skyrim when they were pushing 70.
“Gosh, when I fired that thing up, I could not even believe my eyes,” said Neveu, who has been playing games since the 1970s and 1980s when Pac-Man, the classic 2D maze game, was considered cutting edge. “The game changed everything for me. It’s still the best game I’ve ever played.”
Fourteen years later, Neveu, now 83, is still playing Skyrim, along with any video game he can get his hands on. For the games industry, which has long portrayed and marketed itself to younger audiences, Neveu’s story stands out, but it turns out his is far from an anomaly.
According to the Entertainment Software Association, there are 57 million gamers over 50 years old in the U.S., outnumbering gamers under the age of 18, accounting for 38% of all gamers globally and 56% of gamers in the U.S. alone. And those numbers are growing.
Faced with a crisis caused by ballooning budgets, the come-down from a pandemic-era boom, mass layoffs in the games industry and changing player habits that see gamers spending money and time on fewer games, the games industry needs a lifeline.
A 75-year-old headset-sporting Call of Duty player might be the ticket. Although they still largely sit on the outside looking in, older gamers, who have both time and money on their hands, could help save the games industry, as long as the industry is willing to reach them.
At a time when younger gamers are spending less money on fewer free-to-play games, a focus on older gamers potentially unlocks an untapped audience that still plays, and pays for, the kind of full-price games that have traditionally been a moneymaker for the industry, according to Bob De Schutter, a professor of game design at Northeastern University and a core member of Northeastern’s interdisciplinary research initiative, Games for Life.
Older gamers recently accounted for $2.5 billion in biannual spending on games, according to a 2023 report from AARP, the nonprofit interest group for those ages 50 and older. That’s a small piece of the pie in an industry that brought in close to $200 billion in 2025, but one that the industry needs to cultivate if it wants to continue growing, De Schutter explained.
“We’ve never been thinking about them as our core user base,” he said. “There’s an industry shift that needs to happen there.”
Beyond the industry, getting more people to play games also stands to benefit older adults’ mental and physical health.
“We should have never bought into the [idea that] you’re an adult and now you’re serious and you shouldn’t play anymore,” said Leanne Chukoskie, an associate professor of physical therapy, movement and rehabilitation science at Northeastern and member of Games for Life. “Those people who have held onto it have a lot of mental wellbeing benefits, and those exist in games, too. It’s not just because of the speed of processing as an aspect of cognition, for example. It’s just a way to connect with people, a way to relax.”
But to really allow older gamers into the fold will require developers to understand who older gamers are, what games they play and, perhaps most importantly, why they play games.
A reason to play
In a lot of ways, older gamers are fairly similar to younger gamers in that the reasons they flock to their favorite games are far from universal. That said, there are patterns that industry analysts have started to clock.
While 83% of Gen-Alpha and 78% of Gen-Z play video games every day, 50-plus gamers are no slouches: 45% play games every day, according to the AARP report. Similar to the general population, older gamers are largely playing mobile games on their phones.
AARP also found that while older adults are playing games for fun just like their younger counterparts, 78% also cite the need to stay mentally sharp as a major reason for playing. It may help explain why puzzle games, which have been associated with mental acuity, are the most popular genre among older gamers.
But they are far from the only kinds of games that older adults are playing.
Kate Edwards, 60, a game developer with more than 30 years of experience working on major franchises like Halo, Call of Duty and Mass Effect, still plays fast-paced first-person shooters like Halo. She is far from the only developer to stick with mainstream games like this, she said.
Her reflexes are not on par with what they used to be, she said, but she finds these high-intensity experiences help maintain her hand-eye coordination and focus.
“There are so many variables you need to be managing at the same time, which I think is a more full spectrum activation of what you’re thinking about compared to just passively viewing something,” Edwards said.
There are also plenty of older gamers who have long been invested in playing games for the immersion they provide.
Neveu’s lifelong love for immersive stories started in the 1970s and 1980s when gaming on the Atari 2600 console became a way for him to bond with his then 7-year-old son. But he kept up his gaming streak well after his son left the house, through Doom, the landmark 1993 first-person shooter, Skyrim and even recent releases like 2025’s acclaimed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Neveu’s favorite games, like Skyrim, let him continue to be an explorer by immersing him in new worlds and experiences, he said, something he admitted is increasingly harder for him to do in the real world.
“With Skyrim, it wasn’t like I was playing a game at all,” Neveu said. “It was like I lived there. … I did go back to Skyrim recently just to look it over again. I had a house and a wife there. It was a busy house. It had kids.”
A changing, aging industry
Even though older adults are continuing to play games, the industry producing those experiences is only just starting to understand them.
That shift is starting to happen not only because the people making games, like Edwards, are getting older themselves but also out of necessity for the industry, De Schutter said.
“More companies today are starting to realize that they have to appeal to the widest possible demographic because of the financials,” Edwards said. “We are, for the most part, over the stereotype of the basement-dwelling teenage boy.”
Over the last decade, the industry has been investing more heavily in multiplayer games like Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox, which became free-to-play platforms that encouraged gamers to stay invested for years and spend real-world money on costumes, cosmetic items and other content. The big-budget, full-price single-player games that drove innovation and profits of the biggest developers, including Skyrim, became rarer.
Developers came to rely increasingly on games with a longer shelf life, but that also meant gamers, particularly younger gamers, were spending more time and money on fewer games, De Schutter explained. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an unexpected windfall for the industry, as new people flocked to video games to keep busy during lockdown. As the world has returned to pre-pandemic norms, the industry is starting to buckle under the weight of bigger game budgets fostered by large pandemic-era investments that are not seeing returns in a more tepid economy, De Schutter said.
In looking for areas of growth, industry leaders are starting to turn to older gamers as an audience that plays the kinds of single-player games that have been the industry’s bread and butter for decades, Edwards noted.
Nintendo, at least in its marketing, has recognized this shift. Advertisements for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom portray adult commuters, not just children, playing the game. De Schutter said these are small but significant steps toward creating a wider acceptance of older gamers.
But the members of Games for Life recognize that the industry needs to do more than just change its marketing strategy. How developers design games, and the kinds of games they release, will have to change, too. In AARP’s 2023 report, 69% of older gamers said they don’t feel like games are designed with them in mind.
“A lot of the games are super twitchy, really fast,” Chukoskie said. “If you want to play, you’ve got to have young reflexes. That actually creates this intrinsic bias in the field where we’re designing for these young people who can play these games.”
But some developers have proven that it doesn’t need to be the case.
Wargaming’s World of Tanks, a first-person shooter game where players battle in tanks, has been “overperforming with this demographic” because it relies more on deliberate, tactical gameplay than twitch reflexes, De Schutter said.
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Over the last five years, developers have also begun to center accessibility, implementing customizable controls, text-to-speech tools and even color blind settings. But the conversation has largely revolved around people with disabilities and needs to expand to “the natural disability that comes with aging as far as our eyesight and coordination,” Edwards said.
Developers like Naughty Dog have implemented settings to accommodate different levels of motor skills. But options for larger subtitle text and even better in-game tutorials could also open the door for older gamers, Chukoskie explained.
Rocket League, essentially soccer with rocket-powered cars, also has training tools that let players develop skills like goalkeeping or bank shots in solo practice sessions. They were designed for professional e-sports players but could also be a “curated path” for older adults to hone their skills without the pressure of competing against other players, Chukoskie said.
Old is gold
Making games more accessible for older gamers could not only open a world of possibilities for the games industry but also have a tremendous impact on the lives of older adults.
“Play is a human right,” one that “grounds us, connects us, teaches us how the world works,” De Schutter said. It doesn’t need to go away when we grow up; in fact, researchers at Games for Life say it becomes even more important later in life.
In Western cultures, as older adults age, they often move to retirement homes or other places where they give up a certain level of independence in exchange for support. Games help older adults still exercise some freedom, virtual though it may be, by exploring new worlds, socializing with other people and maintaining the agency they might have left behind, Chukoskie said.
“Being able to live alternate lives in games very playfully is super helpful for thinking about how you manage challenges in life,” Chukoskie said. “Not even just with humans but throughout the animal kingdom, play is simulation. Play is like pretending and working through something.”
Companies like Rendever, which provides immersive technologies like virtual reality to older adults to help them live happier, more connected lives, are starting to tap into this need.
For Edwards, it’s only in the last five years that she’s started to use games as a way to stay curious at a time in her life where she admitted the temptation is to “get set in our ways.”
“I really think one of the baseline, fundamental things about humanity is that we are discoverers and explorers,” Edwards said. “I’m insatiably curious about many things, and games fill that role in a very big way.”
For the industry to open itself to older gamers will require a lot of work, De Schutter admitted: It will take changing entrenched ideas around how to design games and who to design games for, along with expectations around older adults. It will involve embracing the value of play, not only for young people but for everyone.
The reward will be not only a stronger games industry, Edwards said, but a happier and more fulfilled population of headset-wearing octogenarians like Neveu.
As for where Neveu sees his gaming pursuits going next, “I can envision assisted living facilities that have an Xbox hooked up to a big screen TV and a guy like me playing,” Neveu said.
