Among Gamers, Adult Women Vastly Outnumber Teenage Boys 276
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.
Amazing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
I think quantity is a perfectly acceptable metric but not as "total number of women who played a game last week" but rather
"total minutes played by women last week". I would define someone who is playing games 4-6 hours a day as a gamer even
if those games only consist of candy crush, farmville, and word with friends. 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.
Mixing Nintendo and Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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I think marketing just sullied the word "gamer" by including people who play casual mobile games.
Well now. When Slashdot revealed shockingly that Whales Are Ecosystem Engineers [slashdot.org] ... which should have shook the very foundation of nerddom to create a backlash of indignation ... as a handful of researchers casually marginalized the hard work and extreme mental discipline required to obtain a degree in Engineering to some act of mammalian gut instinct... what did we get, ~60 comments?
But tamper with gamer and we come out in force.
It's all fun and GAMES until someone loses their social EYEdentity.
</smi
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Sure, but if you also read the report you'll quickly notice that the demographics of "what people play" are vastly different. Women will generally stick to management/sim/etc style building. Men will stick to racing, rpg's, action games. This of course is one of the fundamental piss-off points, that the "sjw's" seem to forget.
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Why is this surprising? Today's adults grew up on Nintendo. The guy from The Wizard [wikipedia.org] is 38, for crying out loud!
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Quoting just for YOU : Females have become the dominant gamer, claiming 52% of the pie.
Read and comprehend.
That's from the description, which I think is wrong.
If you read the article it said -
Further, females are quickly inching towards becoming the dominant gamer, claiming 48% of the pie.
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're going to get pedantic about statistics, you should really get to know your friendly neighborhood Margin of Error [wikipedia.org]. Often ignored in fluff pieces, being aware of his existence is still vital.
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Personally, calling the players of the former "gamers
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people who thought the Lion King was good are furries.
The animated movie, or the Broadway stage show?
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Candy crush players are not gamers anymore than people who like to watch Star Trek on occasion are Trekkies
Why did you bother to use "on occasion" for trekkies but not for gamers. I would define a gamer based on intensity.
I would define someone who is playing games 4-6 hours a day as a gamer even if those games only consist of candy crush, farmville, and word with friends.
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Really? Here is my anecdotal datem point on the subject. I have been a gamer since the Atari 2600 and NES era. I have been involved in the gaming culture since there was gaming culture (same with the computer and internet cultures as well). Thus far, I have owned and played every major Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft platform made (except the PS4 and XBone due to the still lack of games) as well as many others. My current library spans well over 500 games between consoles and PC (especially Steam). When I go
Normalization (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Normalization (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends what you want to get out of these stats. If you want to find out in which group you're more likely to find a gamer, if you have a same sized sample, then sure, you're right, you need to normalise it. If you want to find out who you should target when you're designing a game you want to sell to people, then no, no you don't want to normalise it.
Re: Normalization (Score:2)
Bingo. Submitter, like most people, does not understand how to interpret numbers like this
Re: Normalization (Score:2)
They're not gamers. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:They're not gamers. (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends what you're trying to qualify.
If it's for marketing purposes, then I suppose that the only thing that matters is how many titles are bought by unit of time, and how much money per title.
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It's not just the spend, it's the spend compared with the cost of developing and marketing the game. A game like GTA takes many millions to make, a game like WoW takes many millions to make and millions more to keep the infrastructure up. You can make a lot of sales and still lose money. A cheap to make smartphone game can be very profitable even if people don't spend much on it.
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So If I spent roughly 10-20 hours a week playing Planetside2 (MMOFPS) for the past year and a half, which was free, I'm not a gamer? No purchase involved. There are many free to play titles (wasn't Farmville that so many mentioned free also?). I don't really play any other games outside of Planetside2, but after being in 3 large outfits (clans/guilds) of several hundred active members at any time, I can tell you male to female ratio is about 50:1 if not more. The whole female gamer thing still seems like a myth.
Its no entirely a myth I know one gamer thats female, she mostly plays single player rpg's like Baldurs Gate and freemium FPS's like Team Fortress.
Re:They're not gamers. (Score:5, Insightful)
The way I see it, calling someone who only plays Candy Crush a gamer is like calling someone who only plays Putt Putt a golfer. As for the number of hours and the amount of dedication, they can be indicated with qualifiers like "Occasional", "Casual", or "Hardcore".
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I know several elderly ladies who are hardcore Wordfeud players. ;-)
Re:They're not gamers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't underestimate the dedication of the members of your local Wii Bowling League. They've been retired for years, and have nothing else upon which to focus their attention.
Who hasn't seen an elderly woman truly distressed when she can't play her pogo games due to some technical problem?
I was talking to a woman last week who is still upset that Yahoo! dropped the Mahjong Solitaire game she liked months ago. (I provided her with many alternatives, but she insists that they're not as fun.)
They have free time. More time than even school-aged children. Their lives revolve around games in a way that the most pathetic WoW addict can only dream about. They set their schedules around their Farmville crops with more consideration than the saddest Otaku does for his Love Plus girlfriend.
They're hardcore. Those of you who think the term 'hardcore gamer' describes an important part of your identity don't even come close. Of course, they'll never describe themselves that way. Games are what they do, without question, but they don't let that define them. (They'd find it rather sad and pathetic.)
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Nawh. Your qualifiers won't do it. I play a lot of one specific game. Quite a bit actually. Yet I've been called a casual player because I have no interest in exploring every nook and cranny, taking every detour and acquiring every tiny reward, and most importantly have no interest in PvP (mostly because of the attitudes).
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It's actually quite easy.
Gamer : playing games = Photographer : taking photos.
Actually for my definition, people who spend time in any game where rewards depend on investment of time or money instead of skill and time devoted to improve it, are NOT gamers. Your WOW stats are irrelevant, your tempest high-scores definitely not.
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The reality is, it matters not the bait of the hook as long as it catches the fish. What brings people into video gaming is pretty arbitrary, what keeps them their and keeps them playing is what counts. You'll find the majority of those that start with simple games on phones will end up expanding their game play to more advanced games on more advanced devices. Social networked games still have a ways to go, people quick linking their phones to play a shared game with their own view on their own screen, in
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Re:They're not gamers. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Right... the basis of this article seems to be "We changed the definition of the word, but ignore that and look at our crazy numbers!!"
Women used to read magazines at the doctors office, but those are always 3yrs out of date so they switched to facebook. That's gotten boring over the years so now there's Candy Crush, which is a slightly more sophisticated version of the old pocket poker or pocket baseball games of the 80s. Not to demean the activity, but comparing that to what Teenagers are doing with a PC or console is a bit of a joke.
That being said, ask me about this while my wife is around and they are the same damned thing, she spends all day "Gaming" so I should be able to play as much RoboCraft as I want to. (a plug for my current favorite game: http://robocraftgame.com/ [robocraftgame.com] )
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Women used to read magazines at the doctors office, but those are always 3yrs out of date so they switched to facebook. That's gotten boring over the years so now there's Candy Crush.
I always look to Slashdot when I need to know whether the dinosaurs still walk the earth.
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That being said, ask me about this while my wife is around and they are the same damned thing, she spends all day "Gaming" so I should be able to play as much RoboCraft as I want to. (a plug for my current favorite game: http://robocraftgame.com/ [robocraftgame.com] )
I went to the page, first the page was covered by a "must have javascript to function" text.
After enabling it for the page it also want to pull in javascript from facebook, amazonaws and google-analytics.
It also have a register button covering half the page but registering doesn't appear to work unless you enable javascript for third party pages.
As someone who is reluctant to register on pages at all I pretty much said nope there.
Huh? It's a steam game, just search for "Robocraft"
To be honest, I just play it and don't care what the website looks like.
You build robots out of what are basically legos and then put lasers on them and fight.
It's free, they make their money because you can buy pre-built robots or pay to level faster.
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As someone who is reluctant to register on pages at all I pretty much said nope there.
Huh? It's a steam game, just search for "Robocraft"
You have to register for Steam to buy Steam games. This caused an uproar when Half-Life 2 was released but has since become the new normal.
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I respect and approve of your reluctance to be tracked.
I also suggest that clinging to that reluctance will block you from much of modern society. The isolation can be psychologically harmful over time.
That depends on whether you have a life in meatspace including meaningful quality time with loved ones.
If you do, you'll never miss the online tracking.
The principle here is that generally anything pathological, like the desire to track people without regard for their consent, requires some kind of unfulfilled need or other problem to provide fertile soil in which it can fester and grow. Otherwise it wouldn't be tolerated because what it offers in return is not tempting.
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"Gamer" is associated with people who spend most of their time playing games inside their mancave.
Don't you mean "in their parents' basement?" :)
Sure, if you limit the definition to men then by that definition only men can be gamers. If you define by game time, I'm sure women will still have a good representation.
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My wife plays a lot of Hay Day. I don't see a lot of true, real life concerning issues there. I guess I don't smell the magic sauce that makes women playing games any different.
Identity politics has taught people to exaggerate these differences, that it's "normal" to worry about things like which demographic is doing what activity. It's just so damned useful for divide-and-conquer purposes for anything from voting to marketing. TFA is merely following what the rest of the media has done for a long time now.
If women want to play games, they will. If women don't, then they won't. To me it's as simple as that. The "magic sauce" is the bullshit concerns of politicians, media p
Re:They're not gamers. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're the one who's confused. There is no "mancave" involved in gaming, except for reclusive pimply-faced acne victims in Momma's basement.
Over the years "gamer" has evolved from meaning someone who played pen and paper rule-based, card, or board games to include video games, and all the sub-genres thereof. 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.
It's only *kids* who think "gamer" has anything to do with a particular style of game or a particular demographic. Gamers are of all ages, genders, and races. But, hey, if you're convinced that "gamer" means pimply faced male playing first person shooter wargame on My Favourite Platform, knock yourself out. You're wrong, of course, but I've learned many years ago you can't convince people who "know they're right" of anything.
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You're confusing gamers with video game players.
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This whole conversation is "no true Scotsman" through and through...
Input is also important (Score:2)
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
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Dude, you're missing the whole point. I'm not insulting people, I'm making fun of a business that was so foolish as to narrowly define their demographic instead of accepting the standard public-use definition of the term. Anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time playing games of any kind is a "gamer."
The term has been in use since before computer games were mainstream. Your local DnD league that runs 3 day sessions on the long weekends with only 4-5 hours of sleep a night are gamers. Your grand
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In other words, the people who just published this "study" have just realized that women who play trivial games on their cell phones are a much larger (and probably more profitable) demographic than their old focus on teenaged boys playing first person shooters.
uselessly broad definition (Score:3)
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
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It's just an oblique attack on men. They would like game companies to not only stop catering to teenage boys, but to actively exclude them in favor of catering to women. Of course, the game companies are not that stupid and realize that equivocating over the term "gamer" isn't going to change a thing.
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It's just an oblique attack on men.
It is, actually, and it's a subtle one. In the face of all evidence, the dogma of political correctness dictates that men and women are exactly the same and should want the same things. Therefore, using this twisted excuse for logic, anything that is done primarily by men must be portrayed as inherently sexist and actively excluding of women. That's what happens when masses of soft-minded people use low-quality logic on "sacred" conclusions they refuse to question.
The idea that it's good enough to hav
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I'm just pointing out what the "gamer" stereotype means.
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Humanity (Score:2)
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".
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Exactly. Most of my computer gaming is with FreeCell and Spider Solitaire. Does that make me a "gamer", since those are games on a computer?
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Monopoly is a game. Football is a game. Mahjong is a game.
Where do you draw the line to define a gamer.
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Someone who doesn't play games?
Seems pretty straight-forward to me.
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I would draw the line at anyone who plays games frequently enough that they can personally identify with a subculture in society that plays the same games they do,.
So that would include Candy Crush.
It can also include people who play Monopoly, Football, or Mahjong.
Horrible summary (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Maybe the point is to point out how stupid it is to concentrate advertising and journalism on a very vocal minority?
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It'd be good if culture could refocus on respecting the notion of growing up, wisdom, and respect for elders. (and get off my lawn, too)
Yes, it would, because the infantile mind doesn't recognize a power grab or the early steps of establishing a soft tyranny when they happen before its eyes.
I'd recommend a copy of Jeffrey Grupp's book The Telescreen if you want to know what's really been done to this culture.
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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".
I can't speak of all women, but my mom spends an astonishing amount of time on her games (Candy Crush, Tiny Zoo, and now some farm simulator). She'll put them down to run errands or do chores, but not to have a conversation. She reminds me of me, 30 years ago and living in her basement.
The games women play may be different from the stereotypical teenage FPS, but they are every bit as engaging to their audience. "Gamers" has a definite connotation, though, and calling women obsessed with Candy Crush and F
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You mean like kids today use the word "lag" when they mean "frame skip"?
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Your sounding defensive and looking for hatred where I read only a statement of facts. Facts don't hate. Gamers are people who play games. Period. End of story. The phrase has never meant "teen aged boy."
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No, I was just responding to your angry post. But nice try :)
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Gamers are people who spend time
It's not just "spend time", "gamer" also implies a certain amount of obsession. "Casual gamer" covers the gamut, but just "gamer" is between Casual and Hardcore. I would bet that most people, who others consider to be gamers, would also add that just spending time does not make one a gamer, but also the amount of zealously one has while playing their games.
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market segmentation (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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A few other observations (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Just my $.02, but this is the most insightful post here.
The definition of the word gamer in the summary is seriously lacking. There's a big difference between someone who spends fifteen minutes playing Solitaire, or Candy Crush, and someone else who's spending twenty hours a week raiding WoW. That said, for the companies who make the products, it's all about who they can pull the most Benjamins from.
And just back to the definition. I have a mother-in-law, so spends about 30min/week playing Solitare, and
Gamer vs. Hacker (Score:2)
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.
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Sorry, but the sensationalist definition serves the ends of the people in power, and therefore will continue to be used by their boot-licking servants in the news media.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Well no, not really (Score: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, themsel
that's game-ah to you. (Score:2)
Gamer ? (Score:2)
ALso video game are sev
Weee - fast news! (Score:2)
Seriously, I read about this via Google+ (!) a few days ago - Slashdot is getting properly slow now.
Bored housewives and secretaries (Score:2)
Well behind the times. Grandmas rule. (Score:2)
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 grandc
Freecell, Farmville (Score:5, Funny)
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".
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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.
Programmatic connoisseurs.
LOL (Score:2)
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!
What about gambling, does that count? (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2)
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
Summary fails stats101 (Score:2)
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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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!
But do people actually buy BT gamepads? (Score:2)
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.