In the industry's latest bit of navel-gazing, a new report throws up some new ideas about what the average gamer actually looks like...
Given all the debate over the R18+ classification of games, and, in fact, about the health and vitality of the gaming industry in general, we always quite like it when we get a bit of news about the state of gaming – and gamers – that isn’t all doom and gloom.
This month, the 2011 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry report was released by the Entertainment Software Association, and what it’s telling us is that gamers are becoming more diverse than ever. In fact, 82 percent of gamers are now over eighteen, with 37 being the average age of a gamer. And perhaps more surprisingly, 29% of all gamers are over the age of 50 – suggesting that the adult gaming community is not just made up of gaming kids who never grew out of it.
On the gender front, 42 percent of gamers are women. In fact, about a third of all gamers are adult women – and that means there are about twice as many adult female gamers as there are teenage male gamers. So much for the stereotypes…
Of course, this raises all sorts of questions about how the gaming industry is adapting to its ever-evolving audience in terms of content – should there be more (and better-written) female characters in games who offer something besides nice CGI boobs? Or should we even be looking past that point to a situation where the gender of characters is a non-issue, as it is in something like Portal 2, where you play as a woman but it’s never actually relevant to the gameplay?
It’s probably a debate for another day, but in the meantime, check out the ESA report here. It is a bit of a hefty PDF, it’s actually a pretty quick read, with lots of pretty graphs, and it offers up quite a few surprises.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012