Boomer basically means 20+ years old nowadays as far as I can tell. Or older than zoomers.

played mostly by Gen Xers and Snake People

For a moment there I was really confused, I forgot about this wonderful extension

If it helps, this is the first time I hear it 🤷‍♂️

Back in my day, we used to call them shooters..

But we had to fight uphill, both ways...

I think they're called that because they postdate the "looter shooter" that combined Diablo-esque "action RPGs" with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. "Looter" without the "shooter" is a much better name for Diablo's genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.

I'm still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don't know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn't also get assigned the label of "boomer shooter", because then it'll be harder for both audiences to find what they're looking for.

So do I. But it is a term from Gen Z to piss off Gen X.

When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old? I’m sure some of them played FPS games, but there is no way they were the majority.

Think about it this way, it's not that the majority of people playing those games are boomers, but the majority of games that boomers play are those games.

Also, this has caused me to look up the formal definition of Gen X vs Boomer, and I did not realize that everyone born after 1964 is considered Gen X. In my head Gen X went from ~1975-1990, everyone before that being a boomer, so assuming other people have the same conception of boomer in their head, then the majority of people able to afford gaming PCs in the mid 90s would be boomers....

They also do just go boom and have stuff like the BFG ...

Sorry it bugs you, but it's far better than the entirely uninteresting/unoriginal "Doom-like". I get it's standard practice at this point, but I'm happy whenever we get an actually interesting, poignant name.

Because boomers programmed them originally.

There's a video on this, but that's just the name that stuck. Its not derogatory at this point, just a way to differentiate a good shooter from a game like CoD

TIL the term Boomer Shooter exists.

Maybe it works if read as "games made by boomers?" ... Yeah I have no idea how old anyone was/is. Time and I don't really get along 🤷

Also, going along with a thing I've been seeing in these comments, I'm idly curious as to whether anyone who isn't a Boomer cares about use/misuse/abuse of the term "Boomer" 🤔

Gen-X: Whatever.

*continues to slay in Warhammer 40K: Boltgun*

When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old?

You mean, like most of us Millennial gamers are now (30+)? The youngest Millennials, born in 1996, will be 30 in 2 years.

These games clearly took inspiration from 90s FPS games, which 👌, but they were played mostly by Gen Xers and Millenials, not Boomers.

I'm a middle-Millennial (1988), and Doom was well before my time as a gamer. I was 5 years old in 1993. Halo (2001) was more my generation, just barely. The oldest Millennials in 1993 were 12 years old, which was not the target age group for Doom.

GenX? Sure, they played Doom, but Boomers were by far the larger age group playing "Mature" games at that time. Video games have never been just for children.