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Among Gamers, Adult Women Vastly Outnumber Teenage Boys
MojoKid writes: The Entertainment Software Association has just released its 2014 report on the state of the video game industry (PDF), and as the title of this post suggests, there have been some significant shifts since the last report. Let's tackle the most interesting one first: Females have become the dominant gamer, claiming 52% of the pie. That's impressive, but perhaps more so is the fact that women over the age of 18 represent 36% of the game-playing population, whereas boys aged 18 and under claim a mere 17%. Statistics like these challenge the definition of "gamer." Some might say that it's a stretch to call someone who only plays mobile games a "gamer" (Candy Crush anyone?). Mental hurdle aside, the reality is that anyone who plays games, regardless of the platform, is a gamer.
This suggests that we have passed a point where gaming has become dominantly a women's hobby.
There are, of course, roughly ten times as many women over 18 as there are males in the range15-18.
What is said at the end of the summary,
is obviously not true.
"Gamer" is associated with people who spend most of their time playing games inside their mancave.
People who play a bit of casual gaming on the go from time to time are not gamers.
The article summary is incoherent and wrong. The article clearly states that Male games make up 52% of the pie, not Females. Secondly, the given the total population of women over the age of 18 is vastly greater than the population of boys aged 18 and under, I have no idea what the point of comparing those two particular statistics is.
This summary is THE example of starting from a conclusion. It is clear that the submitter cares more about the narrative of "female gamers are dominating" then the actual facts of the situation.
Mental hurdle aside, the reality is that anyone who plays games, regardless of the platform, is a gamer.
Or, people who play video games are called "video game players", and the subgroup of people who make it a huge part of their lives are "gamers". Or some other definition. I don't know, I don't really care. If you want to generate page hits by making boys feel uncomfortable by playing mind games with a definition of an adjective they use to describe themselves, whatever. If "gamer" is going to be hijacked to mean something else now, then the community will use a different word.
The Entertainment Software Association should be reprehended for their poor methodology.
Casual Gamers and Hardcore Gamers are two very different market segments, and grouping them together as Gamers is useless and disingenous.
They spent vastly different amounts of money. They want different things from their games. If you design a game for the average of the two, you will miss both.
TFA has some interesting stats, but not much narrative to go with them. I would say that there are two big over-arching themes that are driving changes behind "who plays games".
1) The first generation to grow up playing games is now moving into its 30s and even early 40s. Moreover, while this reflects my personal prejudices only (hey, at least I'm upfront about it), I suspect that with many of the first generation of gamers being academic and nerdy types, they are disproportionately well-paid now compared to their wider generation. So the people who grew up with games in the 1980s and early 1990s now have a lot of spending power. For some years now, the 30-40 year old age group has been the most lucrative in gaming.
This is partly why Japan's importance as a market for (as opposed to a producer of) games has plummeted. Aside from "quick blast on the train" mobile games, gaming in Japan is in a very unhealthy state. Domestic production in Japan, when it targets domestic audiences, increasingly plays for children (eg. Nintendo), teenagers (Capcom) or the unemployed/under-employed "otaku" demographic living off its parents' income (Gust, Nippon Ichi, Cave etc).
This is largely because Japan doesn't have the market of relatively well-paid adult gamers that the West has. Some of that is down to social stigma (games being a "kids' thing"), but much more of it is down to working cultures. Maintaining a middle-class lifestyle in Japan requires the kind of office-hours that would make even a Western games-development house in crunch-time blush.
So yeah... in the Western gaming market, oldies increasingly hold the purse-strings, while Japan is increasingly falling out of the mainstream.
2) There is no longer one single "games industry" any more. If... indeed... there ever was. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the games industry split neatly into two halves marked "console" and "computer", with very little cross-over. These days, that distinction has almost vanished (most console games bar first-party exclusives come to PC, Valve increasingly act as the platform-curator for the PC). But at the same time, there is a growing divide between "core" and "casual" gaming, with the latter not looking much like traditional gaming at all.
Facebook games and mobile titles like Candy Crush Saga draw nothing but contempt from "core" gamers (including many of those affluent 30-40 year-olds mentioned above). But they have drawn in a vast market which would never touch a "core" game - and that market is heavily female. So the demographic of the gaming population in general is skewing to reflect that.
There's also what almost constitutes a third tier somewhere in the middle - the "dudebro" gamer (which is overwhelmingly, though not entirely, male). These are the guys who spend a lot of time gaming, but almost all of it goes into Madden/FIFA (delete as appropriate depending on whether in the US or not) and Call of Duty/Battlefield (delete as appropriate depending on favoured brand of spunkgargleweewee). This is a big demographic, but as MS learned when it pitched the Xbox One at them heavily, it isn't a big-spending demographic or one that's particularly sensitive to technological advances.
Just clarify your fucking terms.
A "gamer" is someone who plays games.
However, if you are only referring to "serious" gamers who invest hours of training to play a particular game, then specify that. Of course, most of the Candy Crush generation aren't doing that (they have a life for a start).
If you want gamer to distinguish between those who buy hardware for their PC to game properly, even that definition won't help you - I've had two people ask me about desktop PC's capable of playing The Sims 3 for their teenage daughters, and you need a decent graphics card for that.
What you want is to use "gamer" as some undefined term that meets your particular clique of game geek. It doesn't. It never has. To me a gamer is someone who was around in the 80's and will happily fight through 10-minute loading screens, unsuitable hardware, pump money into an arcade machine, for proper 8-bit graphics (not the fake-8-bit-retro OpenGL shite you get now) on a game that's almost, if not actually, fucking impossible to complete.
Sorry, guys, but most of you just aren't "gamers". I enjoy a TF2 jaunt as much as any of the other 800 games on my Steam account, that I've had before some of the gamer kids around now were even born. I've run CS servers from 1.6 to the current day. But I still sit and play Altitude like a demon.
Gamer is not a definition beyond "one who games". If you mean FPS player, say it If you mean professional-level twitch shooter, say it. If you mean someone who plays new titles on new hardware, say it. If you mean someone who plays lots of games, or for a long time, or spends lots of money, say it. If you mean someone the industry can sell games to, say it.
But "gamer" means nothing. My mother has completed every Mario game in existence (up to and including Wii U), used to play Horace Goes Skiing back in the 80's, broke four Palm Pilots playing Bookworm Deluxe so much, played Gin Rummy on our first DOS machine, and has caused more money to be spent on the gaming industry than the rest of her family combined. So the industry will target her. And get money from her. And she will buy stuff. To "ignore" her because she's not the stereotypical gamer playing whatever game is considered "real" at that moment would be insanity for the industry.
Maybe she won't join you in a 32-player CS:GO competitive tournament (though she did used to win at Turok quite a lot). But you can't say she's not a gamer any more than anyone else.
See my post above.
My mother is in retirement. She has owned and completed basically every Nintendo console and Mario game in existence (there's probably some obscure Japanese title somewhere, but if you've heard of it, and it has Mario, she's completed it).
We buy her the console for Christmas, we buy her the games when she completes them. It's an expensive outlay all round, given her gaming abilities. She's had more spent on her than my brother and I (old-school "gamers" from the ZX Spectrum era through to today) have spent on games collectively. She destroyed four Palm Pilots back in the day playing Bookworm.
This is exactly the point the article is making. What you THINK is a gamer and funding the industry isn't. Sure, buying your competitive CS:GO server and getting a huge rig to play it on and playing endlessly and winning championships makes you feel like a gamer. But, actually, the money Valve got from that was, what - a copy of CS:GO and maybe a competition entry that mostly went on marketing and prize money? It's a drop in the fucking ocean compared to a teenage girl or mother dropping a few quid every month for years on new Candy Crush levels or Wii Fit titles.
The industry isn't catering to a HUGE PORTION of its market. And it's stupid not to.
Well, since we're now taking the definition of "gamer" and turning it completely upside down, do you think we could get the media to redefine the term "hacker" now?
Would be nice to shrug off the criminal overtones that have plagued that sensationalist definition for the last decade or three.
You've got it backwards. Your mother is a hardcore gamer. But she is an outlier. I know a LOT of people who are nothing like her. If you think she represents a "HUGE PORTION" you are mistaken.
No they don't. The chalange the understanding of statistics.
The information given is useless. First statistics do not change definitions. If you have a definition of a gamer and the outcome is unexpected, you do not change the definition. You change your perspective.
Secondly 'outnumber' in absolute numbers in a group that in itself outnumbers the other group and then make a conclusion is stoopid.
Car example : The number of adult female Ford drivers vastly outnumbers the number of 18 year old Bugatti drivers.
So first you must turn the numbers into percentages. e.g. X% of teenage boys are gamers. Y% of adult females are gamers.
Next you must clearly state WHAT a gamer is.
Depending on that definition, you might also need to include frequency.
And again, even if the outcome is 99.9% of +65 old women are gamers, it does NOT change the definition of gamers. It might change your perspective of gamers, but not the definition.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Mobile gaming is progressing, and encroaching into the PC game turf, due to the better bluetooth enabled controllers that are available today, plus the increased sophistication of the games being created for mobile devices. PC gaming may have seen it's time in the Sun. A new generation is maturing, and it is a 'mobile' one.
A newer study says, by now 51% of all gamers are retired men and women above the age of 70! According to the study, the most popular platform among gamers is "analogue cardboard machines".
In related news: Ubisoft has recently acquired the patent for "a method to render complex GUIs on cellulose survaces using pigments with less light reflectivity than beforementioned cellulose survace with the ability to bind to the cellulose fibres" and is said to be working on a "BINGO GOTY edition" as well as "BINGO 2".
"Mental hurdle aside, the reality is that anyone who plays games, regardless of the platform, is a gamer."
Maybe a teenage boy wrote this summary, because this sort of sophomoric pedantry would be part for the course for a teenager.
Yes, according to the literal meaning of the words, a "gamer" is someone who has ever played a game. In the vernacular, however, the commonly-accepted meaning is substantially narrower than that, implying someone who is an habitual player of video games, in this context, themselves being more involved than minsweeper, solitaire, or yes, kandy krush.
-Styopa
bro.
What I would call gamer is somebody which dedicate quite a sizable part of his life to play video game (whether you see that negatively or positively). If you reduce it "playing some video game sometime" you get a pretty vaccuous statistic where pretty much everybody is inside. It is equivalent to calling "gambler" anybody which made a bet of any sort (casual or not) at *ANY* point in 2014. Pretty much not what is named a gambler , and so that should not be used for gammer either.
ALso video game are severly segmented. They target by segment. Dude-bro setgment (COD, battlefield), sport segment, FPS twitch competition , MOBA segment, MMO segment, single player and "retro" segment, etc... None of those segment have the same appeal to everybody. As such saying 52% of gamer are girl is utterly useless as 1) this says nothing about targeted segment 2) you lowered the "is gamer" definition until everybody is in, so it is useless to targeting.
The fact remain is that even among my numerous nephew and niece, the young segment, *girl* in average might play a game more, but disparage and persiflage against boy which still play a lot more. Sure it is anecdotal, but that's more people than some small scale psychological study use. They do not see themselves as gamer, because most of them rightfully recognize it not as "has played a video game ocne in 2014" but rather "has made a major hobby of playing video game".
That said the proportion of "gamer" aka people making it a hobby and playing numerous hours during the week, is increasingly populated by women. I welcome that because I have been tired of the AAA game for a decade or so (too many which are dude-bro shoota-shoota , women with extremly skimpy clothing, white dude with surging muscle, damsel in distress and male hero which snaps the finger and get the girls ---- where are the beyond good and evil and the world with an heroine ?) and hope to see a surge in different gaming type as women rise to be the fabled 50+%. True to be said there is a much more diverse gaming offer today than there was 10 years ago thanks to indy.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Seriously, I read about this via Google+ (!) a few days ago - Slashdot is getting properly slow now.
Some people live and breath music all their life Some were avid fans during their teenage years but their interest waned as they got older, or even the other way round Some like only a specific genre, others are open to more Some only ever listen to music while commuting to and from work in their car radio. Most go to places to socialize. There's bound to be music playing. So I guess we are all music listeners. Let's see what useful statistics we can conjure up with this info
I would hazard a guess that you didn't look at the list of best selling PC games in that report.
There's indeed a chance that female gamers spend less than male gamers per game on average, but I'm sure that even if that's the case it's nothing like what you state.
Even if you go by stereotypes, Candy Crush Saga is estimated to make $1m per day and the Sims franchise has always been a PC best seller.
The bored underclass of female assistants has been playing solitaire since the mid 1980s. I suppose that makes them gamers.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
New Reports from the "Common Sense Association" indicate: more Grandparents play computer games than Children under 2.
Must be desperate times for Slashdot the original article is "news".
I don't play WoW any more, World of Warcraft, but when I did, I was fully serious about it. I might spend 18 hours a day at it. I ran guilds myself and was a key member of others. And this apparently surprises people but, some of the core guildmembers were grandmothers. Grandmothers are people you really, really want in a guild. They're giving and forgiving and they can really kick ass. They've got more sense than the rest of your raid team combined and they're totally dedicated. Possibly until their grandchild picks a different server.
Is this supposed to be news?
Or game turf is expanding beyond its historical parameters and part of that new growth are filthy casuals beyond anything we could imagine, playing on 2 inch screens with a thumb controller like it`s nineteen eighty-four.
The PC master-race will endure for a thousand years! Win Health!
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Do you really want to call anyone who plays Candy Crush on their smartphone a "gamer"?
I mean, if so, then OK. But then you're going to have to find another name for those of us who do speed-runs through Metal Gear Solid whilst blasting death metal and swigging energy drinks.
I mean, besides, "unemployable jackoffs".
You are welcome on my lawn.
I know we are not meant to read the linked reports, but females have not become the dominant gamer, even by the definition used in the linked PDF: Page 3: Gender of game players: 52% male, 48% female. Sorry.
By the definition in the OP, everyone who has ever played Monopoly is also a "gamer." Congrats old people, you're now grandfathered into the group!
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
I have some games on my iPhone. There are a couple that I've spent a few dozen hours working my way through a few times, then put away. (e.g. "No, Human") There are a few I've played with a little, out of curiosity, but lost interest in. (e.g. "Super Monkey Ball") There are a couple more that I play once in a while when I'm bored and don't want to think. (e.g. "Trism")
Which doesn't make me a "gamer". The only console I've ever owned was an Atari, the last game I played on a screen larger than 3.5 inches was "Riven", and quite frankly I'd rather listen to someone talk about football (which bores me to tears, but at least I know how it works) than hear about whatever games they're playing. I'm sure I could find a common interest or two with many (maybe even most) gamers – perhaps political views, movies or comics or TV shows, hobbies or activities, etc – but they have nothing to do with the fact that I also have some games on my iPhone.
So if your definition of "gamer" is broad enough to include both me and "Call of Warcraft" players, you might as well just say "people" instead. (And pointing out that adult women outnumber teenage boys is not exactly an insightful or useful factoid.)
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That isn't the point though. The potential is immense, and largely ignored by the bulk of the gaming industry. My mother was born in the mid 30's and a church secretary for years. In the early 90's I showed her Jill of the Jungle and she ended up playing through the whole thing pretty fanatically.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Uh, but you're buying it, not your mother. So if you want to talk about who's FUNDING the industry, your mother is not a tally in the "adult female" section.
On the contrary, the industry already is catering to female 'gamers'. It's just that the industry isn't going to stop catering to male 'gamers' as well. And the industry (or industries), unlike the summary writer and some of the more disingenuous commenters, realize that despite that both consist of people who play video games, there are significant differences between the markets.
I once interviewed for a job in Boston. They said they'd pay my plane trip and rental car and that they were a video gaming company. I take the trip out there, find out they do slot machines and then they didn't pay my car or plane fee.
God spoke to me
If you want to break established definitions, sure.
In other news:
-Foodies vastly prefer McDonalds
-90% of film buffs are men (porn), get those films some Oscars!
-The hottest song in the world is the Windows startup chime, or maybe the default Marimba iPhone ringtone
Why would you compare women over 18 to men under 18 and think that means anything? You would have to know the relative size of the populations simply sliced by age to know what you would expect, and then determine if the gender variable makes any difference
And as far as advertisers are concerned the candy crush, farmville, and word with friends group is more valuable as they are exposed to alot more ads than the person playing mario on an xbox.
Especially because people who mod their Xbox consoles to run Nintendo emulators are the same kind of people who run ad blockers.
It's not just Candy Crush. It's also the Sims, and any social interaction games (SecondLife, every major MMO, etc)
The female gaming population has gotten large enough that even a few years ago every fourth player tended to be a female, and that was outside of in-game character gender. Hell probably half or more aren't even hiding behind male personas unlike in the past.
The real question is: Is this just going to fuck up the genres of games males prefer by the gaming companies 'overly feminizing' them in order to pander to the new majority demographic, or will it actually be used to help broaden the appeal of new releases by leading to a development process that takes the multiple demographics and uses them to help enhance the storyline, avatar, etc, by developing a more flexible protagonist and a game environment that provides interests tailored to multiple styles of players.
Our species IS called man
Was. Sometime in the nearly half century since the Apollo 11 mission put a man on the moon, it has become more often "humanity" or "humankind".
The typical portable device nowadays has far more CPU and graphics power than the 386's that ran the Doom series, never mind the original Atari or Nintendo platforms.
In video gaming, output isn't everything. For a real-time game, the input also has to be practical. How does the input of the typical portable device compare to that of said 8-bit game consoles? A touch screen is better for positional input (point-and-click) or an intermittent stream of deltas (like a trackball), but I was under the impression that a gamepad was still clearly superior for the sort of directional control used in (say) a platformer. I haven't seen any clip-on gamepads for Android in use near where I live.
Mobile gaming is progressing, and encroaching into the PC game turf, due to the better bluetooth enabled controllers that are available today
Say a mobile game developer is deciding whether or not to port a game to a mobile platform. Where are published sales figures for Bluetooth game controllers designed for Android or iOS? The only anecdote I'm aware of is that I've nver seen a mobile gamer use a Bluetooth gamepad in public.
". . . blah, blah, blah."
It is kind of disappointing to me that so many AAA multiplatform games still pander to the young male demographic. I'm not sure that it is still true for the current generation, but last generation in the US Nintendo really dominated among female gamers (and college aged as well), the PS3 among elderly gamers (those 40+), and the Xbox 360 among young males.
If you look at the games on those systems, it shows that if you offer games that have an appeal to a wider audience, that audience will respond. Not every game has to be some generic shooter. If AAA publishers want the adult and female markets, they have to start putting money behind games where you do something other than shoot people in the face and watch their head explode.
. . . is to show that female gamers are a bigger MARKET than the under-18 male market that video games have historically been dominated by and for which so many AAA titles are developed.
Despite data showing for years that the average gamer was an adult in his mid to late 30's and just as likely to be female as male, there is still a popular idea in society that video gamers are primarily young males, and judging by the pandering common in AAA titles, most publishers seem to believe this as well.
The first generation to grow up playing games is now moving into its 30s and even early 40s.
I think you're a bit out there. Pong was out in 1972. I played it lunchtimes when at school. Space Invaders was out in 1978. I played it too. So I can claim to have "grown up" playing games in the '70s - 40 years ago. I also played Adventure and Empire on a PDP11 at work late into the evening. The first generation to grow up playing games is now moving into its 50s and even early 60s. (And yes, I'm still a Gamer by most sensible definitions).
Well if the boy is only playing TF2, LoL, or some FtP MMO, he's probably spending less than some soccer mom buying up K-stars for her Kardashian game, or facebook points for Farmville.
For me, it was worth clicking on the article just to find out that there was a clan called the "PMS Clan" that used to stand for "Psycho Man Slayers."
That said, I think male and female gamers everywhere are cringing being lumped in with people who play games on mobile devices.
>The reality is that anyone who has played a piano, regardless of the quality, is a pianist.
>The reality is that anyone who has used waterbrushes, regardless of the quality, is an artist.
>The reality is that anyone who has cooked food, regardless of the quality, is a chef.
Generally speaking, 52% of humans are women. So...