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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.
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.
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.
For me, "gamer" has always carried the same connotation that "film buff" does: just as I wouldn't consider somebody who occasionally goes to the movies a "film buff", I wouldn't necessarily consider a person who occasionally plays games on their phone to be a "gamer".
At the end of the day, though, my litmus comes down to whether the person considers video games to be an important part of their life and their identity. For me, video games were my entire childhood, and are my primary hobby today. And even though my girlfriend never played the hardcore CRPG's and FPS's of my youth, playing Sonic, Kirby, and Nintendo GameCube with her little sister is an incredibly important part of her childhood and remains important to her in adulthood.
To me, that makes her a "gamer", regardless of whether she's played Baldur's Gate, Half-Life, and Ocarina of Time, or not.
This suggests that we have passed a point where gaming has become dominantly a women's hobby.
I disagree. As usual, they miss the measurement of "quality" and instead dumb it down to "quantity". Playing Candy Crush 5 minutes a day is not the same as playing the Xbox until 4am.