Gear Up For Female Gaming Invasion

rmanocha writes "BBC is running a story stating that women are set to explode onto the gaming scene in the near future. 'Existing online role-playing games are succeeding with women in spite of their subject matter, not because of it. When we get more games whose gameplay genuinely appeals to female players, we can expect to see huge growth there,'. What I found really amazing was the statistics for the number of women players - 'women gamers in the UK made up a quarter of the gaming population. This compares to 39% in the US and 69% in South Korea.'."

Comments

Anyone else tired of hearing about this?

[Evro]

Is anyone else tired of hearing about "girls'" tendencies to playing/not playing video games? It seems every week there's a new story about "Why girls don't play games" or "Why girls do play games" or "Girls will play more games if _____." If girls don't play games, apparently they don't want to, so who cares? The only people I can see who'd care about this is the game companies, looking to profit from a relatively untapped demographic. Men and women are different and tend to like different things. There are many reasons and explanations for this, and any of them can be applied to this specific issue. But as the French say, vive la difference.

Inflated Numbers...

[Jinsaku]

From the article: The figures include free games that are accessed via portals such as Yahoo.

The so-called casual gaming market, made up of games such as poker, pool, bridge, bingo and puzzles, is a booming one, especially among women.

Yeah, pretty much every woman I know (including my Mom) that has a computer has played solitaire or bejeweled or something when they were bored.

The real gaming crowd that people think of as "gamers".. people who buy games at the store and play them (console or PC), I'm sure the percentage is probly more like 2-5%. Of course, that's just an estimate.