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If you sampled 100 steam players at random, it would look nothing like that.
by redox99 4mo ago
If you sampled 100 steam players at random, it would look nothing like that.
- poly2it 4mo agoNo average pilot.
- MagicMoonlight 4mo ago[dead]
- boca_honey 4mo agoYeah those people are definetly not a realistic sample of the average Steam user. I wonder why they chose them in particular.
- skupig 4mo agoMaybe you're out of touch, they pretty much look like the typical young nerd from Seattle.
- hellosputnik 4mo agoIsn't it ironic that you used anecdotal data as a rebuttal to anecdotal data?
- skupig 4mo agoNope! That's just how a normal conversation works.
- dathinab 4mo agoto some degree that is the whole point IMHO there isn't a realistic "typical gamer stereotype" anymore sure you can pick any of the past stereotypes and will find people like that, even many, but it's not "most" or even "a slim majority" Games, and with that Steam, have spread through all of society and Steam is the most wide spread platform for it. So whatever anecdotal data you have based on your local environments selection bias is probably not "overall representative", just a slice of one of the many many different kinds of people playing games bought from steam.
- haunter 4mo ago>typical young nerd from Seattle Unfortunately I usually meet gopnik and niño rata in Dota and CSGO and not typical young nerds from Seattle
- solid_fuel 4mo agoTangential but I would not want to play CSGO from a couch with a controller, it's already sweaty enough with a mouse and keyboard.
- haunter 4mo agoI used to play the PS3 version lol, good times. I've actually just downloaded it last week to run it in an emulator. So nostalgic with the old menu, old weapons, old maps etc. (only works offline against but but still fun)
- barbs 4mo agoNo, it's the children who are wrong!
- MrDrone 4mo agoWhat leads you to that conclusion? What do you think the average Steam user looks like? What about them doesn't fit your idea of this?
- piker 4mo agoAverage? Well, male for one. It's not my point, but I don't think you're giving a strong rebuttal either.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- DoctorOW 4mo agoI'd say about half of Steam players aren't male. The "video games are for boys" thing is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy because anyone who believes that will obviously not play with a woman.
- gpt5 4mo agoFrom SQ Magazine (not sure how reliable they are): 92% identify as male, 7% female. https://sqmagazine.co.uk/steam-statistics/ https://sqmagazine.co.uk/steam-statistics/ I think that it's true that games are definitely being played by both males and females today, but I think that statistics is that mobile games skew female, and PC games skew male.
- starkparker 4mo agoThe ESA, which covers only the US ages 18+: 53% male, 68% white, 87% straight, median age 37. https://www.theesa.com/resources/essential-facts-about-the-us-video-game-industry/2026-data/ https://www.theesa.com/resources/essential-facts-about-the-u... A female share of around 40-48% has held steady in this report since around 2007. Quantic Foundry's research largely backs that women prefer more casual-genre games like match 3, with a mobile bent that wouldn't show up in Steam data: https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/ https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre... But they also show a heavy preference for third-person MMOs that are also less likely to show up in Steam data: https://quanticfoundry.com/2023/01/27/perspective/ https://quanticfoundry.com/2023/01/27/perspective/
- squigz 4mo agoDo you and GP understand that it's not 1998 anymore and that many, many different types of people from all walks of life play games? I'm very curious what you and others think the average Steam user really looks like.
- eudamoniac 4mo agoThe 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
- squigz 4mo agoDo you have any actual data to back this up? Because it doesn't really line up with my experience.
- dandellion 4mo agoGo 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.
- squigz 4mo agoClearing up confusion about a demographic by assuming things about other demographics seems like a bad idea.
- dandellion 4mo agoI'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.
- malfist 4mo agoWho says they're average? Why should they be average?
- tshaddox 4mo ago“Movie stars tend to be more attractive and better at acting than the median human. Really makes ya think doesn’t it?”
- tyre 4mo agoThey want to expand the public's perception of who a gamer is, to make people feel more comfortable identifying as a gamer. If you included a sweaty CSGO player farming loot boxes with bloodshot eyes at 3am, that doesn't give you a new market. They're already going to buy. Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart. (And yes, I know why you're asking and what answer you're looking for.)
- Levitz 4mo agoIt's a more nuanced situation than people generally want to accept. >Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart. This is the most simple and probably accurate explanation. Companies like to make money, untapped markets look like money. The problem is that then, the current audience, who is primarily male, can raise concerns about the marketing not catering to them anymore. There's a political arm who doesn't like that at all, and they will not only attempt to enforce collective delusion to dismiss the whole thing (what do you mean? everybody plays videogames, playerbase is split 50/50 pretty much!), but invalidate the very idea that a primarily male audience can have grievances about being catered to. This makes them look insane and alienates the original audience politically speaking, and ironically, makes the original audience look bigoted, which puts consumers off. This dance has been going on for like a decade and a half at this point and it's only recently that signs of it dying down have started to show. I can only hope.
- munificent 4mo agoThere is no average Steam user. People are not vectors of real-valued numbers, and "mean person" is not a coherent concept. Does the average person have half a penis and half a vagina? Is their skin a tan-ish mocha brown? Do they have slightly but not really curly hair that is long in some parts and short in others? Incomplete epicanthic folds? Any representation of people will be a randomly chosen sample, and not an attempt to visualize the blending of all people from the sample.
- JMiao 4mo agothose random players have gaming pcs if you sampled 100 blackberry customers at random, they'd absolutely hate a software keyboard and so on
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- _8L34K 4mo agoI think your bigotry override got tripped - the person above never claimed they were representative of some imagined average, just that it was two people actually playing video games...
- brechin 4mo agoBased on https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ I would imagine out of 100 Steam players, most are playing at a Windows gaming computer with an Intel CPU, a bunch with Windows/AMD, then a few with a Mac, then one with a Steam Deck. Most of those are probably NOT plugged into a TV, so in that way I agree that these are not typical Steam users. That's why the Steam Machine was developed, to bring gaming back to the couch in a way that the Steam Link didn't succeed at.
- mega_dean 4mo ago> bring gaming back to the couch in a way that the Steam Link didn't succeed at. Also in the way that the Ouya didn’t succeed at - their kickstarter tagline was “Cracking open the last closed platform: the TV”. I actually had completely forgotten about the Ouya, but the wording of your comment made me go look it up. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of...
- toobulkeh 4mo agoOh god I bought one of these. It was so terrible. Valve is definitely the right company (private) to pull this off. Gabe just needs to own a foundry and they’ll be set.
- genewitch 4mo agoi got it because it was sold as an alternative to the steam link, but it's just an android phone that connects to your tv - with a market for games. I bought a steam link shortly after, and it still worked the last time i used it.
- kraquepype 4mo agoI've still got my ouya, wonder if it still works. It was a fun idea, even though I mostly just used it as an emulator box. The controllers were neat but a bit janky, I always had issues w/ the batteries.
- 4mo ago
- nearlyepic 4mo agoFirst time seeing an ad? If you sampled 100 F-150 buyers they would look nothing like the people in the commercials.
- dathinab 4mo agoand you might also end up with 100 people with punk hair stiles, or firefighters or whatever Games are so wide spread through all parts of society and Steam is the largest platform for them, sampling 100 people is fully non representive. Whatever stereotype of two people on a couch you pick, there are not just thousands but more like many 100,000ths to millions of people not matching the stereotype at all. I mean think about it steam has daily active user numbers in the multiple tens of millions. My best guess is, the people on the photos are related to whoever created the photos in some arbitrary way. It's a pretty common practice for startups when you need photos like that and have no need for "professional actors/models". Like employees of you or who ever you might have hired to do the photos, or some of their friends etc. You still need to singn a simple contract but it's much less time intensive, complicated and annoying to do compared to trying to hire models (of any kind including such made to look like "gamer stereotypes") .
- redox99 4mo agoAbout 0.3% of people are firefighters in the US. The odds that you end up with 100 of them is: 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% That's 248 zeroes after the decimal point.
- brailsafe 4mo agoI don't see where you're hoping to take this. Looks like a pretty normal scene to me. What substance are you adding to the thread?
- redox99 4mo agoI'm just saying it doesn't deserve such praise for being "real", because if you placed a spycam in a random steam user house it wouldn't look like that. Not that there's anything wrong with it being carefully crafted like any marketing material.
- rsynnott 4mo agoYes, all ads are made by sampling 100 users of the product at random. I mean, you could say this of I think pretty much literally any ad. Were you previously unaware of advertising?
- madeofpalk 4mo agoIgnoring the sitting in front of the TV thing, I think if you sampled 2 steam players at random, they would look nothing like any other 100 random steam players.
- patja 4mo agoI am guessing the BMI would track. Unless they make unlikely changes including spending more time away from that couch, these two are looking at health consequences that will probably make them a burden on society by the time they hit middle age.