Andrew Byatt, CEO of Blaze Entertainment — the company behind the Evercade — has said publicly what the retro gaming industry has been saying quietly for years: the mainstream games industry is failing older players. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz this week, Byatt cited Ampere Analysis research showing 51.89 million gamers aged over 55 across Western Europe in 2025, rising to 56.9 million by 2031. A significant and growing market that most major publishers are largely ignoring.
“If all developers are focusing on these huge cinematic experiences,” Byatt said, “and they’re aiming at teenagers and people in their early 20s, then I think they are missing a trick.”
He’s right. And it’s worth unpacking exactly why.
The Lapsed Gamer Problem
The audience Byatt is describing isn’t people who never played games. It’s people who played obsessively in the 1980s and 1990s — who stayed up all night with a Mega Drive or a Commodore 64, who memorised every level of R-Type, who wore out the carpet in front of a television playing Streets of Rage — and then gradually drifted away as life got busier and games got more demanding.
Modern AAA games ask a lot of their players. A hundred hours to complete. Dozens of hours before the story becomes coherent. Mechanical complexity that rewards the kind of deep investment that’s easy at 16 and considerably harder at 45 with a job, a family, and a finite amount of evening time. The industry optimised for engagement metrics and live service retention, and in doing so made itself increasingly inaccessible to the generation that built it.
The result is a cohort of people with disposable income, nostalgia for specific experiences, and no obvious way back in — unless they’re prepared to hunt down original hardware or navigate the opacity of emulation. Most aren’t. They just don’t play anymore.
The Music and Film Comparison
Byatt makes a comparison to music and film that’s worth extending. Streaming broke open the back catalogue in a way that gaming hasn’t managed. If you want to listen to something released in 1987, Spotify has it. If you want to watch a film from 1994, there’s a reasonable chance it’s on one of half a dozen services. The discovery mechanism is frictionless and the price is already paid.
Gaming’s equivalent — Switch Online, PS Plus Premium, Xbox Game Pass’s backward compatibility — exists but is partial, fragmented, and poorly curated. The titles available are determined by licensing deals and platform politics rather than by what people actually want to play. And the PC back catalogue, while extensive on GOG and Steam, requires the player to already know what they’re looking for.
There’s no equivalent of a playlist that says: “You liked Streets of Rage — here’s what else you’d enjoy.” The discovery layer doesn’t exist. The industry assumes you’re already engaged.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
The people reading this probably don’t need the market research explained to them. We wrote earlier this year about why gaming in your 50s is actually good for you — the cognitive benefits are real and well-documented, and the games best suited to delivering them are often the ones that came out 30 years ago. Self-contained, session-friendly, mechanically legible. You can play R-Type for 45 minutes and feel like you achieved something. You can’t do that with most modern open-world games.
The retro hardware revival happening in 2026 — the Neo Geo AES+, the Evercade Nexus, the Analogue Pocket, the Atari acquisitions, the wave of official re-releases — is, in part, the market responding to exactly what Byatt is describing. The industry’s major publishers aren’t serving this audience, so a different set of companies is. Manchester-based, bedroom-coder-adjacent, physical-media-focused. Blaze is a British company. Analogue is American but small. The Neo Geo AES+ is being made by a European publisher. These aren’t the companies with the marketing budgets. They’re the ones actually paying attention.
The One Thing Byatt Undersells
Byatt frames this primarily as a commercial opportunity — and he’s right that it is. But there’s something else going on that’s harder to quantify. The people in this demographic don’t just want to play old games for nostalgia’s sake. They want to re-engage with a medium they loved and lost, on their own terms. They want to be able to pick up a game, understand it in five minutes, play it for an hour, and put it down satisfied. That’s not a niche preference. That’s a design philosophy the industry spent twenty years moving away from.
The good news is that the tools to access this experience have never been better. GOG. Switch Online. The Evercade library. A Raspberry Pi with RetroPie. The route back in exists. The industry just isn’t pointing anyone towards it.
That’s what pc-play.com is for.
See also: Why Gaming in Your 50s Is Actually Good For You and our complete guide to modernising your retro gaming setup.