I talked to an executive at Skillz a few years ago and she told me that one of their main growth strategies was actually to target prospective women that could be gamers. The way it worked was that a few of Skillz executives were in this market, women who loved video gaming but businesses at the time refused to recognize it.
Imagine a woman who plays mobile games just to kill time at the bus stop, etc. Exec told me that she had friends like this and she has really easily gotten them to adopt all sorts of gaming and knew how easy it was to do this.
So when they looked at it like that, the market for people who were ignored was massive and that's one of the reasons why they grew so fast.
I think another underserved video game niche is our elderly... but maybe that's a separate discussion
So, back in the day I worked with a lot of gaming companies on their advertising. They would point blank refuse to target women because "women don't play games". Even when we demonstrated that women made up a really sizable proportion of their audience, they wouldn't budge.
Really brought it home to me that so much bias is reproduced through the biases of advertisers, rather than the platforms.
Imagine a woman who plays mobile games just to kill time at the bus stop, etc. Exec told me that she had friends like this and she has really easily gotten them to adopt all sorts of gaming and knew how easy it was to do this.
So when they looked at it like that, the market for people who were ignored was massive and that's one of the reasons why they grew so fast.
I think another underserved video game niche is our elderly... but maybe that's a separate discussion