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.
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...
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.
I did not love the v1 Steam Controller, but it's easy to use with other controllers.
The SD doesn't seem to support AV1 decoding, the resolution streaming resolution won't go to 4k despite forcing it in the settings, and the most annoying issue, if the framerate is not set to 90fps, there is 30ms of additional streaming latency. Which means, if I connect it to my 60fps living room tv, it will add 30ms of latency.
Then there are a bunch of minor issues, no virtual monitor, having to manually swap settings to windowed mode and hope the game offers the correct resolution for my TV (since my gaming rig is on an ultrawide), having to leave the gaming pc on and unlocked.
Apparently Apollo or Moonlight will solve some of the annoying issues, but I'm kind of soured on the streaming experience at this point. Streaming on the SD should Just Work.
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.)
>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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately I usually meet gopnik and niño rata in Dota and CSGO and not typical young nerds from Seattle
It's not my point, but I don't think you're giving a strong rebuttal either.
92% identify as male, 7% female.
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.
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...
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/
(Your reply is another example of right-wing discourse being around prejudiced assumptions instead of reality.)
I'm very curious what you and others think the average Steam user really looks like.
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.
Doesn't Steam have a very long tail? Most played might not be very representative.
Maybe young men are just boring and all play mostly just a few games, while majority of players that are more diverse have their interests spread more evenly across others?
In any case, I don't think "not wanting to make assumptions about people based on little to no information" really counts as "very rigorous standards".
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") .
0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%
That's 248 zeroes after the decimal point.
This is a completely nonsensical assumption. If you find three firefighters and one unknown person at a table playing cards, what do you think the probability that the fourth person turns out to be a firefighter is?
But either way I don't understand your argument.
If you're picking 100 people, they won't share any trait. But how is that relevant to this video clip?
If you're picking a random living room where people are playing steam games, there's a reasonable chance it looks like the video clip. Why not? The odds are low you get someone looking exactly like that, but you can say that same sentence no matter who gets picked. Don't fall victim to the lottery paradox.
except it very well might look quite like that. I happen to know such a case and I don't know that many people IRL.
Video Gaming became widely available roughly in the 90th in many of the places the steam machine is expected to mainly sell to (US/EU/CA/AU/UK/some other places, a lot of special cases). And most people who grew up with video games don't stop gaming. This means that Steam customers and gaming in general is not _at all_ anymore a hobby where most people fall under a small handful of stereotypes.
In turn statements along the line of yours are really quite meaningless and misleading. Steam has stopped being "just for nerds" or anything like that a long time ago.
And sure, things are probably different if you limit yourself to people active on steam forums, that place has a very different bias and using it as basis can lead to huge misconceptions about how people who "use" steam generally live.
Lastly let's also take a moment to consider who this steam machine is advertised to:
- no children, doing so is a regulatory pain
- not young adults, in current times 1k is just too much for someone currently trying to see if they can move out of their parent's place
- so more adults with a stable job/income, which grew up with gaming or at least do game a lot (so mainly age group ~20-35)
- also excluding the kind of people which would anyway go for a 3+k gaming system even if prices where more normal (like a lot of tech enthusiasts with money, "pc masterace" gamers, etc.)
and if you consider that potential customer base the chance for a randomly sampled home (of the target customer audience) to look somewhat like that(1) just went up quite a bit.
And exactly this is also the group for which the clip is, because a major part of the clips "message" is something on the line of a vague combination of "It's a product for everyone"/"Not just for nerds"/"Not just for tech enthusiasts"/"No special tech knowledge needed to play". I.e. "hey person who might live in an apartment without any nerdy stuff, it's also for you, you don't need special tech skills or anything like that". And this is kinda the only group where such a clip might make a difference in weather or not they buy, most other customer groups either won't buy anyway or will make a decision based on spec and reviews...
So IMHO this is a very well chosen clip setting.
Funnily the room does contain a lot of the kind of "not perfectly fitting furniture" you find a lot IRL due to a combination of people not finding fits and replacing/adding furniture over time with slightly changes in taste. I wonder if that was intentional or if the studio provider just didn't care or hat issues finding the right sets of things them self.
---
(1): As in: It has no "nerdy" things, or tech enthusiasts things. And is "just" a "normal/boring" adult apartment taken a clip of shortly after it was cleaned.
I mean, you could say this of I think pretty much literally any ad. Were you previously unaware of advertising?
if you sampled 100 blackberry customers at random, they'd absolutely hate a software keyboard
and so on