9 Crippling Problems With The Video Game Industry (And How To Fix Them)

2. The Industry Doesn't Know How To Market To A Maturing Demographic

The Problem: For the longest time, games were 'for kids', thought of as wastes of time played only by basement-dwelling NES-lovers, forever clutching their precious pixels in place of any physical interaction. All that changed with the overwhelming success of Wii Sports and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare though, as suddenly gaming was wrenched out of the underground and into the mainstream.

The average game was revealed to be 35; a tech-savvy individual who's paid attention over the years, ageing alongside a medium that was always 'theirs', but is now casting a wider net than ever.

The Solution: This point goes hand-in-hand with microtransactions and blind boxes, as how many runaway news stories have you read about anyone over 30 accidentally spending thousands of dollars on in-game purchases? Exactly.

Every once in a while we get something like a Last of Us, a Firewatch, a Bioshock Infinite that really massages the temples and appeals to a mature gamer with matured sensibilities, but far too often it's this refusal to accept that the majority of gamers are of age, that cripples the majority of narratives and depth of game mechanics.

Put it this way: Those floating arrows, hand-holding tutorials and "Press X to win!" on-screen prompts? They aren't for you. They're for people - or an age group, physically and mentally - that want their games to be one big digital sugar rush.