GamesIndustry.biz wrote an interesting piece about the growing market of "grey gamers," and the main point is pretty simple: there are more older players than ever, (and growing) but the games industry still mostly acts like every player is young.

This is a very interesting especially because it is likely a trend that will continue for the next few decades. Video games started getting mainstream popularity in the 80s, and the gamers of back then are growing, so soon enough we will reach a point where the majority of people alive have grown up in a time when videogames were mainstream.

Some estimates report that the UK has 6.6 million gamers aged 55+ in 2025, rising to 7.3 million by 2031, with Western Europe going from 51.89 million to 56.9 million over the same period. That's a lot of older players!

Not to mention how as those players get even older and reach retirement, they will have tons of time and tons of money, so why aren't they being served by the current gaming industry?

I think that is especially true for the AAA industry. So many big-budget games are built around fast reflexes, live-service progression, battle passes, constant updates, huge open worlds, and endless noise. That obviously works for some players, but not everyone wants that, especially older players with different tastes, priorities, or accessibility needs.

But this is also where I think indies shine.

There might not be many AAA games explicitly "for retired people," but on Steam there are indie games for every niche imaginable. I would not be surprised if a lot of the audience for games like Euro Truck Simulator, factory/automation games, management sims, city builders, and cozy simulators is older than the typical AAA target audience. Those genres are not served that well by AAA, but they are served extremely well by indies.

So the takeaway for devs, especially indie devs, is not "make games for old people" in some generic patronizing way. But rather it is: pay attention to underserved audiences. Not every market wants faster, louder, bigger, more competitive games. Sometimes the better opportunity is a clear, thoughtful, slower, deeper game for an audience that already exists but is being ignored by the biggest companies.

The Unity Asset Store Summer Sale is live! As always this is one of the biggest sales of the year with thousands of the BEST assets on sale. As usual it will be 50% off the top assets, and up to 90% OFF for some Daily Deals!

My own Code Monkey Toolkit is 50% OFF on this sale! It’s got over 50 Tools to help you make games BETTER and FASTER!

Check out everything on sale HERE!

Unity AI is genuinely very useful! Importantly, it’s very useful in many use cases OTHER than generating visuals, in fact I think these other use cases are the most useful ones:

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There is a completely FREE 14 day trial so you can try it risk free and see just how much it can help you in your workflow. Get the FREE Trial HERE!

Synty is back on HumbleBundle! Another great one with thousands of awesome Low Poly assets at 95% OFF!

Characters, Environments, Animations, UI, VFX, all in their signature style.

Get it HERE!

This is a wild topic that I never expected to cover, a post titled: "Turns out femboy baiting is a pretty solid marketing strategy in Chinese social platform."

Apparently one dev tried to market their game the "normal" way and got 1-2k views and 10 likes. Then they promoted the same game but with themselves (male developer) dressed up as a woman, got 60k views and 3k likes! That's quite the difference!

Nowadays marketing is so difficult that crazy out-there ideas like these might be a genuinely viable strategy. Although at the same time, views don't matter, what matters are wishlists and sales. So even tough this strategy was successful at getting attention, I wonder how successful it was in gathering wishlists. Also it worked on making this post viral on Reddit.

So maybe this idea is a bit too out-there for your taste, but this is a great reminder that marketing and getting attention is difficult, so try out everything to see what works for you and your game.

With so many showcases (Summer Game Fest, Xbox Games Showcase, Day of the Devs, State of Play, PC Gaming Show, Nintendo Direct, and more) it's hard to keep track of everything that was announced.

If you didn't have time to watch everything, here is a great website listing everything announced at every one of those events.

I mentioned some of my own highlights in the last Game Dev Report but since then more games have been announced. Lots of awesome ones on the PC Gaming Show like Stronghold 4, 2 Fights 2 Tight Spaces, El Paso Elsewhere 2, Valheim 1.0, and more.

Check out all the showcases on the website, it's an impressive list of awesome games coming out in the future!

Do you feel like partying but don't feel like leaving your house? Here is an awesome virtual rave!

It's an online web-based massively multiplayer online rave!

Join, listen to music, dance, meet other people, customize your character, and stay the whole night!

It's a pretty silly idea but it makes for great second screen content! Keep in open on the side and enjoy the music while you work.