Re: Strategy on the Decline

Supposedly the sweet spot for game buyers is between 18 and 38.

Think about how that demographic has changed from 30-40 years ago.

The pandemic put a serious dent in the level of learning / brain
stimulation for school kids while that was going on, and even before
that their brains were being manipulated and diluted by social media
algorithms.  To them, gaming is pokemon on the phone, not
Civilization.

Then you have the folks 38+ who have played so many shit games they
paid for and regretted, then subsequently were flooded with free games
that they can't find time to play, that sitting at the computer for
hours in a typical turn based strategy is the last thing they're
interested in wasting their life doing.

There is probably a nostalgia audience for strategy games, but they
aren't likely to spend a lot of money or be eager early adopters.

When team based tactical first person multiplayer shooters emerged and
I started playing with organized teams, I realized that the level of
planning, overall strategy, and tactics that were available in that
genre not only satisfied but overshadowed everything I originally
liked about strategy games like Civilization, or Empire on the Atari
ST, Ancient art of War and AAoW at Sea, etc.  There was just no
comparison.

But consoles changed the multiplayer shooter landscape.  And speaking
of consoles, that in itself probably didn't help the fate of the
strategy genre, which is typically not as well suited to a game
controller as a mouse/keyboard.

Today, a lot of the kids who would have gotten interested or even
addicted to strategy games are probably too distracted by teen girls
shaking their tits and ass on tik tok to notice much of anything else.

In my work I'm often in contact with the current generation of
software developers, and most of them are brain dead compared to their
equivalents of 30 years ago. 

Growing up Googling "How Do I Do This Or That" has not exactly
exercised their brains, and upcoming AI capabilities isn't going to
improve that situation at all.