Female Demographic is PC Gaming’s Largest, Says Nielsen Report
By Earnest Cavalli
April 08, 2009 2:44:11 PM
Women have recently been making inroads into the traditionally male-dominated world of videogames, but would you believe that the fairer sex makes up the largest demographic of PC gamers? It’s the truth, according to a new report from the Nielsen media group.
“Females 25 years and older make up the largest block of PC game players,” says the official Nielsen website, paraphrasing the actual report. This extremely valuable segment accounts for “46.2 percent of all players and 54.6 percent of all game play minutes in December 2008,” the site adds.
A bit skeptical about these figures? Turns out Nielsen’s report includes absolutely all forms of gaming, including casual games that come built into any computer. The pictured-at-right Chess game that ships with OS X, for instance.
As a result, the report recognizes casual Microsoft-crafted card games (read: the ones that come with all Windows PCs) as the most popular genre of games. Solitaire took the number one spot of all games played during December 2008, with its immense 17 million person playerbase.
Full explanation for these figures, scientific survey documentation and other interesting figures — Did you know that Xbox 360 owners are less likely to watch primetime TV than Wii fans? — can be found by reading the entire Nielsen report (.pdf). It’s a bit dry, but at only 9 pages, it’s the least painful marketing report you’ll read today.
Image courtesy Electronic Arts
Source: http://blog.wired.com
That’s really amazing numbers.