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Gamer Behavior Categorized
Vodoo Extreme has the results from a recent study that looks into the spending and playing habits of gamers. From the article: "Gamers spend more than $700 a year: $341 on console titles, $233 on PC games and another $140 for accessories."
Or maybe thats honestly what people pay. It's only 14 a year, but that's more than one a month. Given the wild success the original halflife (and its mods) still enjoys, at least some empirical evidence exists in favor of the "averages gamers sit on their ass less than McKinney83" theory.
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Open Source Sysadmin
If gamers use games as their main source of entertainment, $700 isn't so bad. It is easy to spend that much just on a cable TV subscription.
Of course, it would be better to spend a little less and save that money, but, hey, Social Security will still be there...right?
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
"Gamers spend ..." with 95% confidence, 19 times out of 20?
I agree with the parent; trusting IGN to do statistics is like believing everything you read in Score:-1 posts.
Based on this, I'd say it's pretty clear that teens and college students are overrepresented in the survey relative to the true gaming population. I don't know anyone in their mid-20's or older who can come close to averaging 20 hours a week. At the same time, nearly every male I know that's my age games on a reasonably frequent basis. So I'm guessing not many of them responded to this poll.
This would've been more helpful if they'd have published an age breakdown of survey respondents. I think it'd be interesting to know, for example, how many hours per week 25+ year olds can play.
My userid is prime!
...and they could cut that in half if they were patient. Wait a few months for a price drop. Hell, wait a year for something to hit the bargain bin. The games aren't gonna disappear if you don't buy them right away.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
By polling their own users, IGN are more likely to get hardcore gamer results rather than the average gamer, therefore it can't really be counted as a study
A better study would maybe be a questionaire inside Gran Turismo 4 or another game that will be widely sold , so it would not be affected as much by gender, genre liking, age etc.
Business Voyeur
PC Gamers spend a little more than that... $200 for 10,000 RPM Hard drive. $500 for latest video card. $300 for the newest RAM. $1000 for the latest CPU. $200 for a motherboard. Etc. Repeat every 18-24 months.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."