The big untapped market is the casual gamer. Nintendo has explicitly stated they are after this market, microsoft are also making a lot of shifts to capture this audience. Blizzard are laughing in their (possibly) evil mansion as they already have men and women playing and spending online.
According to the New York Times’ interpretation of this study, 65% of women between the ages of 25 and 34 play video games while only 35% of men in that same age bracket play video games.
The big difference is that women choose to play so-called “casual games” that are commonly found on portals such as Pogo.com, MSN.com, and Yahoo.com (and Xbox Live Arcade, too) while men favor games that are sold at places like GameStop. There’s no hard data on why the sexes have such different gaming preferences, but many believe it’s because women favor less competitive games that lack the violence and complicated control schemes so prevalent in “hardcore” games enjoyed by men.
I like the irony in my title to this post. Giggle.
1 response so far ↓
1 Lucus // Dec 6, 2007 at 6:27 PM
thinks are changing, for example more women are shwing up in games like halo 3, graw 2 and Bf2 online gaming.
Leave a Comment