PC The #1 Choice For Kids Gaming

An NPD study entitled 'Kids and Gaming' has revealed that for the latest generation of gamers, games on the PC is their first taste of the hobby. Interestingly, kids seem to go through a sort of 'gaming life cycle', starting with kid-oriented systems (Leapster), with PC games picking up around six and console gaming beginning around ten. The study also confirmed something you probably already knew: more kids are gaming than ever before. "The study, which surveyed kids aged two to 17, said that more than one-third of children in the US are spending more time playing games than a year ago. Half of these kid gamers are 'light' users at five hours a week or less and the other half are 'medium, heavy or super users' who game six to 16 hours-plus per week. With the kids surveyed who play games online, an average of 39 percent of their time is spent playing games online versus offline. The majority of the kids (91 percent) play free online games."

Video Games != Games

[hal2814]

It does annoy me greatly when these two are written interchangeably. My daughter is in the 2-6 age group and has a Leapster that is gathering dust. She plays plenty of games but not video games. She loves soccer, Candy Land, and Sorry. All kids play games of some sort. The kids in the survey are playing video games more. I'd be interested to see what they stopped doing to spend more time on the PC playing video games. I'd wager it most of them gave up time from some sort of non-video game.

Re:You wouldn't know it from the game stores ...

[Dracil]

It's largely a self-fulfilling prophecy. When they devote all their resources to promoting consoles and ignoring PC games, is it any wonder that people don't buy as much PC games at their stores? And then they wonder why PC games sell like crap, and thus do even less for PC games.

Re:You wouldn't know it from the game stores ...

[moderatorrater]

Because they tend to make their money off of trading in games, which you can't do effectively on the pc due to piracy concerns. Since they can't get trade ins for pc games, and since they don't have the scale that wal mart does, they can't sell the games for a decent price. I can't imagine buying a pc game at a console game shop simply because the prices are so high.