I heard they are better for gaming. Somehow, you are supposed to get a better sense of direction from which sound is coming.
I don't really understand the concept. They fit completely over my ears and sound very good.
Prepping for retirement, I've downsized. I game on a space we made in the basement for me and my PC, so, I'm away from household sounds and others are away from me.
I made some kind of crappy infographics to explain the difference, using a shooter game as a framework for the design.
In infograph A, the deep blue line is the feeling of soundstage that closed back headphones might create. It creates your typical left and right feeling, you can kind of get a sense of things, right? It sounds normal and what you'd expect.
A)
But in infograph B, the light blue line is the soundstage open back headphones might create. Here you can not only hear sounds better (like the footsteps), and be able to pick apart where they're coming from, but some of them (like the explosion) have moved further out into the soundstage, better helping you pinpoint their exact position and distance that they came from to begin with. You might even be able to hear distant sounds that you couldn't before because now the mix is wider and things don't get mushed together with the rest.
B)
Obviously there might be better ways to describe all of this, but this is something I threw together to hopefully give you an idea of how it works and why open backs can be beneficial in games. A lot of it is about positioning and sense of distance and openness