ESA Study Finds Women Make Up Nearly Half of Gamer Population

[Abomination]

My girlfriend, before we met, played a lot of World of Warcraft and MUDs. Some guys got ahold of her e-mail address somehow (she says she didn't give it to them), and the men in her guild flooded her inbox with dick pics. So she switched guilds and the same thing happened. Then she made a new character on a new server, and it happened again. Then she made a male character and played it for about an hour before saying, "this is stupid." And that was the last time she ever played a video game online.

I have to apologize on behalf of my gender. I think a lot of guys don't realize just how relentless and pervasive the harassment is for women.

I don't see why you would need to apologize on behalf of your gender when it was just a select few members of your gender who did such things.

Not every man on the internet is a raging dickhead and not every man stands for other males behaving in such a manner towards women.

Your story also seems a bit... specific. I haven't heard of that occurring more than maybe once or twice and I know a LOT of females from World of Warcraft and other MMOs who haven't had that experience - which I assume there's more to than just guys sending her pictures of their dicks JUST because she's a girl.

 

[chozo_hybrid]

Hear that games industry? Time to start treating the ladies with a bit more respect and all that good stuff! There is a lot of them out there and certainly enough to market games that way.

 

[tardcore]

Jesus fucking Christ. A gamer is someone who enjoys playing fucking video games. No matter what kind of game it is, if it makes the game maker money, then it should be counted. If a player of a certain type of game doesn't measure up to your imaginary epeen yard stick of coolness, then tough titters.

This is the exact heart of the fucking problem with the entire video gaming industry. They have entire untapped markets they could create and sell games to but are stuck in their fucking little ruts where they are too afraid to make anything but the same old trash they've made for the last decade. Only this time round its shinier, more expensive to create yet at the same time has less actuall playable content and more time wasting cut-scenes, and nickle and dimming DLC.

So we have an entire industry that thinks they only have a certain portion of the population as a customer base, they only like certain types of games, and anything outside this demographic is terror incognita. Which means we long time gamers are stuck with a slew (more like spew) of nearly identical games for years with little to break up the monotony. And certainly nothing to bring new blood and new ideas into the fray.

Don't get me wrong, I love first person shooters, I love hack and slash fantasy, I love RPGs, I love turn based and live action strategy games, but at the same time whenever I try a new one, I can't shake the feeling that I've already done this many times before. So in order for this industry to grow and evolve, they need to look for new branches of creativity.

What does this long winded diatribe have to do with the percentage of women gamers you ask? Quite a fucking lot. It shows there is a largely untapped female customer base, and it also shows that they may not like the same games their male counter parts enjoy. However, I actually think trying to break this schism down based on gender is a arse from elbows not knowing kind of way to go about it. The reason being is I'd be willing to bet there are just as many male gamers that like game types outside the current industry standard boundaries as women. It might come as a shock to game makers to find out that not all of we male gamers have the same drives and lack of sophistication as hormone addled thirteen year old boys.

 

[Sexy Devil]

*deleted*

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Gonna sound like a dick for saying this, but they're probably mostly casual. I'd like to see how they define 'gamer' and what games were looked at. I don't know why making a distinction between casual games like Farmville and Bejeweled, and video games, like virtually any game that comes on a disc, is being maligned here. Most of the comments are 'but they're including casual games' and a few others are accusing those of having a superiority complex. No. They're different markets, and to suggest that the industry isn't marketing to 35-year-old females enough is stupid when it's not the industry in question, in the same way one might suggest that Facebook games could be a bit more challenging or deep to appeal to teenage boys.

I'm not someone who is going to agonize over what the term 'gamer' means and try to exclude people from calling themselves that. But casual games are different from non-casual (proper? video? mature? actual? large? challenging? real?) games, and to treat them the same out of some sort of misguided political correctness is a misrepresentation of the demographics and helps no-one.

Show me a study that says women and men are equally represented across the library of disc-based games, and that might prove something.

EDIT: Well, I looked it up, and there's nothing specifically linking gender/age and the kind of games they play, but they include plenty of parents, and according to the study enjoying the games themselves is the least popular reason for playing with their children. But it's not really clear.

 

[mitchell271]

Define core gamers? I think this whole nonsense of your not really a gamer unless you insert X is silly. If you enjoy playing any video game on a regular basis, you are welcome to the gamer party.

A core gamer would be someone who is deeply engrained in the gaming culture. They probably visit gaming sites every day or two, play games once every day or two and can tell you the difference between certain publishers and developers. There's a good chance that they also have at the very least tried most genres and decided which ones they like best. For example, if you exclusively play Angry Birds and Call of Duty and don't know the difference between EA and Activision, you're probably not a core gamer. If you know who CilffyB and Gabe Newell are, you're probably a core gamer.

When people say core gamer, we usually don't mean it's some exclusive club were you require X amount of knowledge, experience and gaming related wares to join. We just use it to describe how prevalent/important video games are in someone's life or if they have a real passion for them. We welcome everyone and encourage others to join us by sharing what we love.

OT: Isn't that statistic kind of misleading? Everyone plays video games at this point, it's weirder not to in this day and age. We expect there to be an equal amount of people who play video games. However, how many are members of that core audience? It must be very low at this point considering that the games industry is male dominated, caters almost exclusively to male tastes and has to fight to get a woman on the cover[sup][a href="http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/sexism-controversy-surrounds-last-of-us-box-art/"]1[/a][/sup] or as the protagonist[sup][a href="http://www.digitalspy.ca/gaming/news/a466992/remember-me-was-turned-down-over-female-lead-character.html"]2[/a][/sup]. Once we can get past this childish "boys club" mentality, we'll make it more open.

I'd love to see everyone invested in games as heavily as we are, but the fact of the matter is that we probably won't. To quote Ken Levine, "Our gaming world, we sometimes forget, is so important to us, but? there are plenty of products that I buy that I don?t spend a lot of time thinking about. My salad dressing. If there?s a new salad dressing coming out, I would have no idea. I use salad dressing; I don?t read Salad Dressing Weekly. I don?t care who makes it, I don?t know any of the personalities in the salad dressing business. For some people, [games are] like salad dressing."

 

[Bellvedere]

While I think that casual gamers are still gamers, I would be interested in seeing the demographics for particular genres, and platforms.

 

[Yuuki]

Jesus fucking Christ. A gamer is someone who enjoys playing fucking video games. No matter what kind of game it is, if it makes the game maker money, then it should be counted. If a player of a certain type of game doesn't measure up to your imaginary epeen yard stick of coolness, then tough titters.

This is the exact heart of the fucking problem with the entire video gaming industry. They have entire untapped markets they could create and sell games to but are stuck in their fucking little ruts where they are too afraid to make anything but the same old trash they've made for the last decade. Only this time round its shinier, more expensive to create yet at the same time has less actuall playable content and more time wasting cut-scenes, and nickle and dimming DLC.

So we have an entire industry that thinks they only have a certain portion of the population as a customer base, they only like certain types of games, and anything outside this demographic is terror incognita. Which means we long time gamers are stuck with a slew (more like spew) of nearly identical games for years with little to break up the monotony. And certainly nothing to bring new blood and new ideas into the fray.

Don't get me wrong, I love first person shooters, I love hack and slash fantasy, I love RPGs, I love turn based and live action strategy games, but at the same time whenever I try a new one, I can't shake the feeling that I've already done this many times before. So in order for this industry to grow and evolve, they need to look for new branches of creativity.

What does this long winded diatribe have to do with the percentage of women gamers you ask? Quite a fucking lot. It shows there is a largely untapped female customer base, and it also shows that they may not like the same games their male counter parts enjoy. However, I actually think trying to break this schism down based on gender is a arse from elbows not knowing kind of way to go about it. The reason being is I'd be willing to bet there are just as many male gamers that like game types outside the current industry standard boundaries as women. It might come as a shock to game makers to find out that not all of we male gamers have the same drives and lack of sophistication as hormone addled thirteen year old boys.

You're...you're joking right?

Have you even heard of companies like Pop Cap, Facebook, Nintendo and Apple? Do you how many games they've got out there to appeal to audiences that aren't interested in AAA titles? Do you know how many people are PLAYING those games? Millions upon millions, to the point where they make up such a huge portion of "gamers" that it's enough to allow females to make up a whopping 45%+ if we were to look across all games/categories. That's where the ESA statistic holds true.
Everybody knows that jack-all women are interested in the more "serious" genres like FPS/RPG/MMO/RTS/etc, but they are playing games made by the above companies on an absolutely astonishing scale!
Should I even mention the sheer number of females who are huge fans of games like Sing Star, Just Dance, Wii Sports, etc on consoles like XBox/Playstation? There are a lot of them too.

So what's all this nonsense of "untapped market" and "same old trash"? How about you actually LOOK BEYOND companies like EA and AAA releases, because there's a lot more going on in the world of gaming than you think dude.

Christ...

This is totally plausible, I once saw my father leave his cell phone on the counter while on his way from skydiving to go race car driving, and my mother totally eyed it for a few seconds from the stove before he caught her, with the back of his hand.

O_O

 

[Cat Cloud]

Hmmm, maybe more of these women would be interested in playing more hardcore games if the community didn't seem so hostile against their presence in gaming...

Honestly, I have female friends who I've been able to get into more hardcore gaming from casual gaming. You just have to show how it can be relevant to them and what they look for in entertainment. Macho man war shooters aren't chick magnets.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

90% of CoD player are males, 10% are female.
20% of FarmVille player are male, 80% are female.

55% of the people are male, 45% are female.
Therefere, the next Cod should pander to female because they make up almost 50% of the user base.

See how retarded this is? You're basically saying that CoD should pander to the 10% of the player base.
I puller those numbers out of my ass, but they are more likely to be true than saying 45% of the CoD audience are females.


We should try to attract females into gaming, however, this statistics are bullshit and can't be used in a real argument. They aren't conclusive enough for it.
They take the total sum of all people playing any sort of games and act as if it represents the game industry.

People who play iOS, Android or Facebook games are far less likely to buy expensive games. They are casual gamer. That's not a bad, degenerative term. That just means they take gaming casually.
People who buy games regularly, people who are more likely to buy expensive games and hardware for their hobby, people who are invested in their hobby, who follow gaming news, events, know the difference between publisher and developer... those are core gamer. That doesn't make you a better human than casuals. That just means you're more invested in your hobby.

No matter how much you may or may not like this, the majority of casual gamer are female, while the majority of core gamer are male. That doesn't mean that publisher shouldn't try to get more female into the core audience. It just means that they can't go heads into pandering to females.
I'm proud of all of you female core gamer who show your true powerlevel, however, you need to accept the fact that for now, you're a minority. That doesn't mean you should stop fighting for more female character and representation in gaming. It just means, stop using flawed statistics as this one to prove your point.
When you use a flawed argument, as soon as it's beaten, all your other arguments get less weight because they could be flawed as well, for all I know.

P.S. The people who disprove this argument in this thread aren't doing it because they are butthurt. Well, at least the majority isn't doing it because of that. No, we are doing it because we are tired of the same old, flawed, argument being used over and over again on the escapists. It simply got tiresome to disprove it over and over again and be accused of sexism for simply telling the truth. We don't mean anything bad with it, we just say that argument is flawed, but keep on fighting.

There will always be someone who is sexist, but I assure you that the majority of escapists aren't.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

You know what, I have a solution to the gamer thing. To be a gamer, all you need to do is self-identify as one!


I'm fairly certain a lot of the bejeweled and senior home crowd does NOT identify as gamers and do not think of themselves as that. I think this is a significant reality which should be accounted for with these statistics.




It's not elitist to not count someone as a gamer if they themselves don't really think they are one in the first place, right?

 

[Tentaquil]

Breaking News!
Studies have shown that OP is a genius, and has in no way brought up points that have been said before

But I would like to know if playing a game on a smartphone makes you a 'gamer', as this would mean that my ....mother.... is now classified as a gamer.

 

[solemnwar]

No matter how much you may or may not like this, the majority of casual gamer are female, while the majority of core gamer are male.

Since "casual" gamers seem to be inextricably linked to "facebook games"...

http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/social-gaming-industry/

Distribution of Social Gaming By Gender:
54% female
46% male

Not that much of a majority...

 

[Mooboo Magoo]

Well, I've seen my mom click away on Solitaire and Bejeweled. I can safely say that she is no gamer.

I say, if you never threw a controller into the wall or smashed your mouse, you are no gamer, just like messing around with fingerpaints in my youth does not make me a painter.

A player, maybe.

So you have to be an idiot with anger issues in order to be a gamer?

First of all, thanks for calling me an idiot with anger issues, I guess? I applaud you for being a pillar of tranquility in the face of, say, losing a lengthy boss battle due to a sudden QTE.

Second, my mom would be the first to say that she is no gamer. She is a player of some puzzle games, sure, but not a gamer. She is not or will ever be any kind of target audience when it comes to games. A gamer to me is someone who devotes him/herself to the medium, someone I can have a lenghty conversation about games as a participant instead of observer. I really don't know how I can explain my view on the term "gamer" better than this.

Third, I don't know why Escapist keeps changing my avatar since I started subscribing, but I can assure you that I am quite female recently celebrated my 30th birthday.

Oh, and let's not act like being a gamer some kind of merit badge. It is simply a title that defines you by your favourite hobby.

See this is the problem. We need a better term. Many people feel that you aren't a 'real' gamer unless you are heavily ensconced in the medium. It's like saying you aren't a real movie watcher unless you are a film buff and know a certain amount of film history or theory. Everyone plays games but not everyone plays games like we do, and that is an entirely understandable opinion.
I'm sure it will happen eventually. It is true that currently the market of 'core' games has a very different demographic than 'casual' ones but that is because of how new the medium is. There is also the fact that it is interactive rather than passive. There is no learning curve to watching a new movie, for example, but as games become more popular more young people are going to be playing them and learning those skills so that it will be a non-issue when they are older. This will lead to less of a difference of demographics, and I imagine that at that point people like us will probably call themselves game buffs or something, kind of like film buffs do. There will still be a divide, just like there is between the average movie goer and someone who understands movies as an art form, but it won't be as prevalent of one as it is now.

 

[infohippie]

Even if someone plays Bejewled or Peggle or Farmville, they're gamers, because they're spending money in the industry. Is their money less important than COD or Halo or RPG players?

Well, to be honest... No. Their money isn't as important. Because their money finances the creation of more shitty casual games and makes publishers who see all that cash flow want to be the next Zynga rather than the next CD Projekt or Bethesda. And that hurts the industry by making the bigger, more complex games that we all know and love less appealing for developers to create.

 

[Dogstile]

I keep hearing that, but where the hell are they? Correct me if I'm wrong, but most communities are composed primarily of guys. Same thing with the industry itself. I keep getting told every user has just under 50% chance of being a chick but it doesn't really seem to apply when you look at the users, does it

I think that the general abuse a woman gets every time she has the audacity to talk in game makes them not want to talk to male gamers very often.

 

[generals3]

*yawn* I have shown in many topics why this isn't as relevant/big news as some people think. A gamer =/= a gamer.

http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/141/videogames.asp

- a majority of men classify themselves as expert gamers or frequent gamers while women classify themselves as occasional.
- male respondents play 17.46 hours per week on average compared to 6.51 for women
- men spend on average 333$ per year on game related stuff vs 87$ for women
- female players were more likely to report that they spent more time doing non-video game activities (e.g., watching TV, household chores), and that they preferred watching TV over playing video games.

Now you know this 45% doesn't mean that much anymore, now does it?