Anita Sarkeesian, Video Game Rape Culture, and Why Online Harassment Is Not a Joke (long screencap)

[Posteritatis]

48. The "typical" video gamer these days is actually somewhere in their thirties

At least going by pretty much any look into the demographics of that population over the last several years. The last ESA survey last year figured mid-thirties with about a 60/40 split between male and female gamers, though the specific breakdowns would change a lot once you go into genres, platforms, etc - for example, MMORPG gamers tend to average closer to the mid-twenties instead of the mid-thirties, and more grognardy strategy gamers are more likely to be jerks on political grounds instead of "just" being violently misogynistic.

The main demographic is still mostly the population that started playing them back in the eighties and early nineties, and things have generally moved along with that group. It's one of the reasons so many big-name titles these days are rather more adult-oriented than they would've been fifteen years ago. I'm thirty-one, have followed that sort of thing as a hobby long enough that I'm dabbling in design on a professional-on-the-side level, and have definitely been seeing how things shift that way over the years. (I'm also very much at the younger end of the age range for the genres I most enjoy playing.)

There's problems in that culture to say the very least, but approaching them from the perspective that "gamers are all nerdy teenagers who play games sixteen hours a day" is both inaccurate - and has been for a long time, a fact that is consciously ignored - and unhelpful. It's a rather larger-scale set of issues and not one that can just be blown off with the "lol, stupid kids" handwave.

If anything the demographics make the kind of reaction in the OP more rather than less distressing, because a lot of the problem is, in fact, coming from people you'd otherwise consider "normal human beings having a normal life" who've passed the head-out-the-ass threshold. If it actually was just kids then it would be a lot easier to dismiss as people who'd eventually grow up, but a lot of the problems, between the players themselves and the industry itself, are coming from people who - in theory - have done so by now.