Who do you see when you picture a video gamer? A 17-year-old boy playing Grand Theft Auto in his parents' basement? Or a 55-year-old mom playing Mahjong online?
With the success of Nintendo's Wii console, which targeted "non-gamers" with its intuitive motion-sensing remote controller, Microsoft is now waking up to the power of older gamers. As Microsoft v.p. Peter Moore recently told Bloomberg, ``If we don't make that move, make it early and expand our demographic, we will wind up in the same place as with Xbox 1, a solid business with 25 million people...What I need is a solid business with 90 million people.''
They'll do this, in part, by adding more family and parlor games to the Xbox Live Arcade system, the digital download service.
This isn't new territory for Microsoft. The company has been pursuing so-called "casual games" for years on its MSN Games service. A few years ago during a visit to the company, I ran into Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, who has been brewing up puzzle games for Microsoft.
Problem is, Microsoft faces a challenge in getting gray gamers to feel comfortable on an Xbox, no matter how many Tetris clones it serves up. It's one thing to play a casual game on a PC or cell phone (the preferred platforms), and another entirely to paw a 360 controller.
