Do you have any actual data to back this up? Because it doesn't really line up with my experience.

Go on Steam, look at the most played games right now, look at the demographics for those games.

Or pick some player profiles at random, count how many girls vs guys you find (very easy to tell with high accuracy just by looking at the games they play, yes there are exceptions but they're actually quite rare, I promise you can get >90% accuracy after you do a few).

Steam user base is at least 3/4 male by user count, probably even more by play time.

Maybe, due to the budget specs, they figure the “cozy gamer” demographic will be their sweet spot. Hence the Stardew Valley video and Cuphead with its retro/nostalgic graphics. The people they showed do seem like they’d fall into that demographic, which would be less concerned with their FPS counts and playing games that don’t stress the system as much, generally speaking.

That is confusing. The Nintendo switch is half the price, and plays all of those games. Why would someone want to buy the more expensive Steam machine just to play 2d pixel art games?

> look at the most played games right now, look at the demographics for those games.

Doesn't Steam have a very long tail? Most played might not be very representative.

Maybe young men are just boring and all play mostly just a few games, while majority of players that are more diverse have their interests spread more evenly across others?

Clearing up confusion about a demographic by assuming things about other demographics seems like a bad idea.

I'm not clearing up confusion, I'm letting you know it's pretty easy for everybody to see that you're wrong. If you want to continue being wrong just because the method used doesn't meet your very rigorous standards, suit yourself. Emperor's new clothes and all that.

It's just a bit strange how 'everybody' doesn't seem to include me - based on my own experiences gaming over 20 years not lining up with any of this silliness - as well as others in this thread.

In any case, I don't think "not wanting to make assumptions about people based on little to no information" really counts as "very rigorous standards".

Which part? Are you actually claiming that in your experience steam gamers are mostly black, mostly gay, mostly women, or what? Because that would be a shocking statistic we'd probably know about given the general population demographics of race/orientation, and general interaction with the female sex in real life.

I would not claim Steam users are "mostly" any of those groups, frankly.