I was actually the poor kid in a rich area so like my friend had a commodore and the game consoles as they came out (and his family was like average wealth for the area). Money was definitely not stopping most of the kids from being into video games. Arcades were very active to so nothing keeping kids from being into gaming by going to the arcades but again it was a crowd that had almost 100% overlap with the comic book shop.
I view the gaming distros as being about out of box. I don’t see anything improving performance outside of how the kernel compiles but I doubt any do anything special.