I wouldn't go that far; the number of older gamers is a lot more than "few", even on consoles, and while they're more accepting of tropey teenage protagonists than older Western gamers are, it's more of a resigned acceptance than an active desire.
Then again, Taro Yokoo exemplified the teenage-boy-worship when, in directing Nier, he had a mini-hissy fit when the other directors wanted an older protagonist. Having played Nier, I can think of arguments for the boy hero, but Yokoo certainly didn't make them -- he figuratively stamped his feet while saying, "But this is an RPG! The hero has to be a young boy!"
Hiroyuki Ito summed up my desires (as a 30-year-old) perfectly in a post-FFXII interview when he said that his focus was on the older fans who might have drifted away from the FF series (because he knows that SE has been alienating them) and how he wanted to make a game that both young and old could enjoy. Reading between the lines, you could see where SE thwarted some of his plans in favor of younger-fan-favoring ideas.
(Question for under-20 readers: did you find FFXII "too grown-up" in any way? Was its relative (relative!) sophistication off-putting at all? Somehow I doubt it, and that any negative feelings towards this kind of game by the younger crowd are dwarfed by the negativity toward childish FFXIII by the older crowd. What say you?)
I'm confident that Japanese producers will break out of the seventeen-year-old-boy-hero trope pretty soon. They're going to have to -- if births peaked in 1974, and the average age of marriage is 29-30 (as I think it is in urban Japan these days), and the conventional wisdom is that only young single guys get to play console games and have to trade them in for work-commute handhelds when they get married, then the biggest potential fan base went into permanent decline in 2003-04, when this cohort turned 30. The number of teens/20s people in Japan has declined every year since, and will keep declining for at least 20 years into the future, because there are even fewer toddlers and babies around now.
Demographics was one factor behind the surge in brain-training games a few years ago -- people pushing 40 and seeing their first gray hairs and wanting to stay sharp. You see 40-ish people of both sexes with DSes and PSPs on the train all the time.
I'm left hoping that the Vita can be the bridge: console-level graphics on a machine small enough to carry around. Eventually the Vita will get a TV-out and we'll have a good compromise: Dad can play the cross-generational AAA games made by people like Ito and Matsuno on the train every day and occasionally sneak in a session on the big screen. Each additional rumor of PS and PS2 ports to the Vita further convince me that the generation who played those 10-15 years ago will want to come back and play them again, and that the Vita will do pretty well.
