I think that info on demographics would be interesting. My gut says that TBS has probably the oldest average age of any game genre, and also probably the most disposable income, too.
As I've gotten older, things like puzzle games and FPS have lost their appeal, particularly as most of the latter turn into MMO in order to play at all. I'm also not willing to put the money into a max-graphics machine anymore ($400 graphic cards and $1500 machines to run them in are silly, when a $500 all-in PC will play GC3 for years). I also recognize that I don't have the fast twitch to play competitively. About the best "FPS"-style game I can do is the World Of Warships stuff, because that's actually slow paced and tactics matter as much as aiming and reactions. That said, WoWS has to have one of the crappiest dev teams I've experienced in a long time, and it's a classic example of a company that neither understands how to make money from a game or manage their game world in terms of balance and fun (the fact they make money says more about the idiots who pay them than it does for any successful company strategy).
Back here, in the RTS/TBS world where I spend my money, I really find that the distinction is Tactics (RTS) vs Strategy (TBS). Most modern RTSes are now pretty much Third Person Shooters, with some minor production stuff slapped on. I'm always going for TBS, since it has three things I prefer:
1. It's interruptible. That's important as the demographic ages, since we have less and less contiguous blocks of time to play.
2. It requires a lot of thought. RTS success generally follows a formulae that doesn't change too much between major updates, and your success in it basically boils down to following the script better than your opponent(s). A lot of that has to do with the lack of variety in maps, but it also is pretty much enforced by the limited scope of a RTS; just like there's not a lot of different winning moves for a squad of marines in a firefight, RTSes suffer from the lack of viable options for play. TBS of course none of this applies - there can be some general principles, but overall, you're required to think a WHOLE lot more and be mentally flexible.
3. TBS games tend to be sandbox ones, where mods are varied and interesting. RTS generally are extremely constrained, because the level of skill required to add in new features is FAR too high for most people, and there's little in the way of low-hanging changes that can be made. A classic example of this for me was Homeworld 2. Beautiful and unique 3D space RTS. But modding it required an enormous effort, and generally required advanced Maya skills to add new ships, and a programmer-level knowledge to make any other changes to the system itself. Consequently, there are really only 2 mods, and not much else. TBS as a genre almost always has a huge amount of flexibility to mod, and it's far easier for the casual person to mod it, and that leads to MUCH more interesting variety of play.
One thing here specific to GC3, and especially to us founders: I'd like to find some way that SD could make an additional revenue stream off us. I know, I'm asking for a way to pay SD more money, after I did the $100 I'm-so-Insane founder deal. I feel the DLC deal included in the original Founder concept was really nice, but it did cut off future revenue completely for SD. Maybe next time, SD should commit to a "Founder-level" buy-in that gets people all Expansion packs (for instance, Mercenaries and Crusade here), but not the DLC "bling". I do feel it would be fair to find some way we pay $10 or so every year for additional content of some kind. I just don't have any ideas as to how to do this.
