The average video game player is 41 years old, and nearly half of players are women. Those figures come from a 2025 survey by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) of 24,216 weekly players across 21 countries. Yet game advertising still centers young men. This article sets out what the public data shows about older women as players, where it stops, and what the evidence says about how the industry markets to them.
One limit applies throughout. This article could not find a public study that reports on women over 40 as a group. The closest figures are the global average age, which includes both genders, and a US breakdown of baby boomers (ages 61 to 79), so the evidence below covers older women only in part.
Who is actually playing
The ESA’s global study reports a gender split of 48% women and 51% men among players, with 1% not specified. Its sample covered weekly players aged 16 and over in 21 countries. A separate research firm, Ampere Analysis, put the figure at 48% as well, or about 922 million women across the same 21 markets, which VGC reported in March 2026 works out to about 93 million fewer female than male players. Both sources therefore put women just under half of all players.
The US picture for older players comes from the ESA’s 2025 Essential Facts study, a YouGov online survey of 5,000 Americans taken in February 2025. It found that 49% of baby boomers play video games weekly, and that 52% of boomer women play, against 46% of boomer men. The report does not say whether the 52% and 46% figures refer to weekly play. It also does not report how many boomers of each gender play, so it does not show that women outnumber men among older players. It shows only that a larger share of boomer women play than of boomer men, in one country.
The same US study found that boomers play mainly to pass time or relax (77%) and to keep their minds sharp (65%), and that puzzle games are their most popular genre at 73%. The brain-health motive matches research GameBridges has covered on video games and cognition after 50. The ESA summaries reviewed for this article do not break these motives down by gender, so this article does not claim that women and men play for the same reasons. That claim appears in many summaries of the data, but the public report does not support it.
The marketing gap
Advertising to women is the area where the data is thinnest. The imagery is easy to describe: the default gamer in game marketing is a young man with a headset. Measuring that, or showing that older women specifically are absent from campaigns, would take a content analysis of advertising, and this article found no published one. That claim is an observation, and readers should weigh it as such.
What exists is market research suggesting a mismatch. The 2025 Mintel advertising report, which covers the US, says women, especially mothers, are more likely to engage with and buy from in-game ads, and that they appear underserved by campaigns that meet their needs. A section heading in the same report says older gamers play more ad-heavy games. The public summary gives no figures for either point, so the size of the effect is unknown.
A December 2025 MarketCast report surveyed 1,679 women and girls and 397 men. Its public page says women are shaping the future of gaming culture and commerce, but the findings sit behind a registration form. Figures circulating from it, such as a claim that 88% of women say customization increases their desire to buy a game, could not be confirmed from any open source, so this article does not use them.
The industry’s usual response to evidence of a large female audience has been a separate category of games marketed to women. That is an opinion about industry behavior, not a measured finding. It rests on a common critique that such products treat women as a niche and leave the assumptions behind mainstream design untouched.
The stereotype problem
Women are often described as casual players who prefer mobile puzzles. The Ampere data complicates that picture. Women were more prevalent than men on smartphones and tablets, but they also showed a preference for narrative-driven single-player games over competitive multiplayer. Compared with men, Ampere found, women more often cited a dislike of gaming culture and community and difficulty finding games that suit them as reasons for playing less, and less often cited lack of time or money. Its conclusion was that the barriers are unappealing themes and an unappealing culture, not cost or time.
Harassment is the clearest documented part of that culture. The 2024 Bryter Women Gamers Study found that 59% of surveyed women had experienced toxicity from male gamers, down from 72% in 2022. It also found that 26% had been sexually harassed and 12% had received rape threats, and that more than one in four hesitate to call themselves gamers. The sample covers PC and console players aged 16 to 65 in the UK and the US, so it does not describe mobile players or other countries, and it has no separate result for women over 40.
Ampere adds that many women avoid voice chat in online lobbies because of toxicity, which can create the false impression that women are not playing online games. This is a plausible link between the harassment data and the stereotype, though the research reports it as an interpretation, not a tested cause.
What older women actually play
Here the public evidence is mostly indirect. The ESA’s US data puts puzzle games first among boomers, at 73%, and skill and chance games second, at 55%. Ampere’s game-level data is more specific but not tied to age. Of 52 console and PC games it examined, only Animal Crossing: New Horizons, The Sims 4 and Roblox had more female than male players, and 18% of the female players surveyed said they had played The Sims 4 in the previous three months. Of 50 mobile games, 13 had more female than male players.
Popular claims about specific games are weaker. Many articles say that Wordle, the New York Times word games, Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing draw audiences that skew older and female. This article could not find audience breakdowns by age and gender for Wordle or Stardew Valley, and the Ampere data confirms a female majority only for Animal Crossing, among these titles. Readers should treat the others as plausible but unproven.
One observation is offered here as opinion. Low-pressure games with no competitive element, such as farming and life simulations, seem a good fit for players who want engagement without adversarial play, and the Ampere finding on culture is consistent with that view. It is not a measured result for older women. Players who prefer lower-stakes games at the table can also look at GameBridges’ picks for the best card games for travel.
The business case
The commercial argument is often stated more strongly than the evidence allows. Claims that women are the industry’s fastest-growing and highest-spending segment could not be traced to a source that can be read in full, and this article found no published spending data for women over 40, so it makes no claim about their disposable income or loyalty.
What the sources do support is narrower. Mintel finds that women respond to in-game advertising yet appear underserved. Ampere finds that women’s main stated barriers are culture and a lack of games that suit them, not time or money. Taken together, that suggests demand that the industry is not fully meeting, although the sources do not measure its size. That reading is an inference, and a different one is possible: some of these players may simply prefer other kinds of entertainment.
The surveys also have a built-in limit. The ESA’s figures describe people who already play, and they say nothing about how many older women would play if the products or the culture were different. For research on why people of any age play at all, see our article on the evidence for play.
What would change things
The evidence points to two separate problems, and they call for different fixes. One is design and marketing: games and ads built around a narrow idea of the player. The other is the online environment, where toxicity pushes women out of the multiplayer spaces that define much of the industry. In this article’s reading of the Ampere findings, fixing the second matters at least as much as the first, because cost and time were not the main barriers.
Whether games made for a broad audience, not labeled as games for women, do better with older women is a claim this article cannot test with public data. The ESA reports that 36% of the Silent Generation (ages 80 to 90) plays weekly, which shows that play continues into the oldest age band the survey covers.
The sharpest single figure comes from the Ampere game-level data: of the 52 console and PC games in its sample, only three had more female than male players: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, The Sims 4 and Roblox.