The video game industry is leaving billions of dollars on the table by failing to serve its fastest-growing demographic: players over 40. According to analyst firm Ampere Analysis, the United Kingdom alone counted 6.62 million gamers aged 55 or over in 2025, a figure projected to climb to 7.32 million by 2031. Across Western Europe, the numbers are even starker: 51.89 million older gamers in 2025, rising to an estimated 56.9 million by 2031. Yet when industry leaders and developers talk about their target audience, they almost invariably picture teenagers and young adults in their twenties.
This blind spot is not merely a cultural oversight — it represents a structural market failure that is becoming harder to ignore. Joost van Dreunen, CEO of Aldora and former head of SuperData, puts the opportunity in sharp financial terms. “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 highest disposable income, the longest gaming literacy, and the strongest brand loyalty. They are also, van Dreunen notes, “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.”
An Entire Generation Is Aging into Gaming
The demographic shift driving this growth is well documented but rarely acted upon. In the United Kingdom, around 13% of the population was aged 65 or over in 1972. That figure leaped to 19% in 2022, and is projected to reach 27% by 2072, according to the Office for National Statistics. Similar trends are visible across Japan, the United States, and much of Western Europe. These aging populations are not abandoning video games — they are carrying their lifelong hobby with them into retirement.
Jerk Gustafsson, head of MachineGames, articulated this reality earlier this year. “I am 54 years old now, 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.” Gustafsson’s point is straightforward: the industry’s natural demographic expansion is pointing toward older players, yet development priorities remain stuck in a younger-focused past.
Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at Newzoo, put it even more bluntly during the “State of the Industry 2026” talk at the Nordic Game conference. “You have more and more players that are older… maybe 40, 50, 60 years old. And if they are retired, they have even more money — but nobody’s making games for the retired people.”
Why the Industry Has Ignored Older Gamers for Decades
The neglect of older players is not a recent phenomenon — it is a structural bias baked into the industry’s DNA. Van Dreunen draws a direct parallel to another long-standing blind spot. “Developers have been ignoring older gamers for the same reason it took them decades to discover women. 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 consequences of this bet are now becoming visible. As the core youth demographic becomes saturated and competition for its attention intensifies, publishers face shrinking margins and rising acquisition costs. Meanwhile, a wealthy, loyal, and growing audience of older players remains largely untargeted by major releases. Van Dreunen argues that the first publishers to genuinely see this audience will capture a structural advantage. “The rest will arrive 10 years late, exactly like they did with women.”
What Older Gamers Actually Need from Modern Games
Understanding why older players drift away from modern titles requires looking beyond surface-level assumptions about taste. Matthew Ball, the veteran analyst who joined Xbox as chief strategy officer in early 2025, has identified a specific design failure that disproportionately affects the older demographic. “We are definitely losing that cohort,” Ball told The Game Business. He suspects that older gamers are more likely to take extended breaks between play sessions, and most modern games are terrible at helping them return after time away.
“There is a mismatch between the general investment in tutorials for the first few minutes, relative to where actually the player loss happens,” Ball explained. “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?'” Ball points out that user testing rarely accounts for this pattern. “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?'”
Jack Emmert, who rejoined MMO developer Cryptic Studios as CEO in 2025, brings a personal perspective to the problem. At 57, he remains an active gamer but acknowledges that his physical needs are changing. “I can’t do twitch games for more than 30 minutes at a time, because my hands hurt. 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.” Emmert points to older role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate as examples of titles that offer deep engagement without demanding lightning-fast reflexes. “Give me a 50 year old every day over a teen. 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.”
The Talent Gap at the Top
Emmert identifies a deeper structural issue that perpetuates the industry’s youth focus. “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.” The vast majority of game designers, producers, and executives are under 40, and they naturally design for themselves and their peers. Emmert suggests this is neither conscious nor malicious — it is simply a fact of an industry that has historically prized youth and has done little to retain veteran talent. “I don’t know whether they consciously do it, or it’s subconscious, but it’s just a fact.” The result is a feedback loop: young developers make games for young players, older players feel increasingly alienated, and the industry interprets their absence as a lack of interest rather than a failure of design.
Retro Gaming and the Power of Familiar Brands
One of the most immediate ways to reach older gamers is through the games they remember from their youth. Larry Kuperman, who served as vice president of business development at remaster specialist Nightdive Studios until his retirement in March 2025, sees a clear opportunity in re-releasing and remastering classic titles. Nightdive’s remasters of Turok, Blood, and Star Wars: Dark Forces are prime examples. “These are brands that will resonate with that community,” Kuperman says. “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.'”
Andrew Byatt, CEO of Blaze Entertainment, the company behind the retro-focused Evercade console family, confirms that many of his customers are returning to gaming after long absences. “We find there’s a lot of lapsed gamers. They really want to re-experience stuff that they did when they were younger.” Byatt believes the industry is overlooking this group by chasing spectacle and scale. “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.”
Retro games also offer a practical advantage that modern blockbusters often lack: they can be completed in a reasonable timeframe. Older players may have disposable income, Byatt notes, “but they may have less time. They’ve got busy jobs and everything else. And actually these retro experiences are good for that.” The relative brevity of classic game design — measured in hours rather than dozens of hours — aligns naturally with the schedules of adults who cannot dedicate entire weekends to a single play session.
Hardware Realities: What Older Gamers Will Actually Play On
Kuperman raises a question that rarely gets asked in industry discussions about the future of gaming: “What will we be playing it on?” He argues that older gamers are unlikely to invest in heavily specced-out PCs or next-generation consoles, especially given the significant hardware price increases seen in recent years. “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 category is platform-style games like Roblox, which run on low-powered devices. Kuperman doubts that Roblox will penetrate deeply into the older demographic. The more promising categories, he believes, are “cosy games, casual games, and retro. And retro has an advantage in that audience in that you don’t need the latest computer.” This aligns with Blaze Entertainment’s strategy of offering affordable, self-contained handheld devices like the Super Pocket, which provides access to classic game libraries without requiring a console or high-end PC. “I think that’s important for this crowd,” Byatt says, “because they might not be super-committed, hardcore gamers.”
Marketing to an Invisible Audience
Reaching older gamers also requires rethinking how games are marketed. The viral TikTok campaigns and influencer-driven video showcases that dominate youth marketing rarely reach players in their fifties and sixties. Byatt says that for Evercade, traditional channels outperform social media by a wide margin. “Email is still the most powerful marketing tool for us. Our email list is gold. It’s how we reach our customers. It’s more powerful than our social media channels.”
This insight has broader implications for any publisher looking to target the older demographic. The channels that work for younger audiences — short-form video, streamer partnerships, discord servers — may be near-invisible to the 55-plus cohort. Effective reach requires investing in email newsletters, print-adjacent digital publications, community forums, and retail partnerships that older consumers actually engage with.
The Back Catalogue Opportunity
Byatt also identifies a frustration that extends beyond any single company or product. “I’ve always had a bit of a frustration with the difference between gaming and music and film. 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.” For older players who want to revisit the games of their youth, the barriers are often prohibitive: discontinued platforms, incompatible hardware, missing digital storefronts, and complex licensing issues. Making gaming’s rich back catalogue as accessible as the Spotify or Netflix libraries would unlock significant value for the older demographic — and for the rights holders sitting on dormant intellectual property.
Byatt emphasizes that retro does not have to mean old. “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.”
The opportunity for the games industry is not about nostalgia for its own sake. It is about recognizing that a generation of lifelong players is entering a phase of life with more time, more money, and a continued desire to engage with interactive entertainment. The publishers and platforms that design for their needs — accessible hardware, forgiving game design, familiar brands, respectful marketing, and curated back catalogues — will capture an audience that the rest of the industry has spent decades ignoring. As Emmert puts it, “Give me those 60 year olds who watched Star Trek the original series. Come on down, play Star Trek Online with me.” The question is whether the rest of the industry will extend a similar invitation before the next decade passes them by.
