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Reston,
VA (December 14, 2000)
– PC and console gaming is no longer just a man’s folly, according
to a new report available through PC Data.
The study reveals that while males makeup 55 percent of overall
gamers, females for the first time comprise a majority of online
gamers.
The
report indicates that 35 percent of home Internet users plan to
purchase console or PC games during the current Holiday season.
A majority of these (69 percent) plan to buy console games. An
estimated 60 percent of U.S. households own a PC and one in three owns
a game console.
The
study, entitled Spotlight on Games: Categories and Hardware, utilizes
a variety of data sourced from PC Data’s complete offering of retail
sales tracking, Internet audience measurement, software usage
tracking, hardware configuration and custom survey.
“The
Christmas Holiday is huge for the online and offline gaming industry.
Consumers have already spent over $3.4 billion at retail alone
for games,” said Sean Wargo, Internet analyst for PC Data.
“By year end, these figures could double making it a seven
billion dollar industry. While
the report shows that PCs are the platform of choice of gamers,
console games will be the clear winners in terms of sales for the year
and Holiday season.”
The
results indicate that women comprise 50.4 percent of online gamers and
that they typically favor online gambling, card games, and quiz and
trivia games online.
Other
key findings from the report follow:
Men
and women prefer different types of online and offline games.
Males prefer war and sports themes.
Men are also three times as likely as female gamers to
participate in first person shooter games (38 percent vs. 12 percent),
real-time/turn-based strategy games (33 percent vs. 11 percent), and
sports games (30 percent vs. 10 percent).
In contrast, female gamers prefer board/card games (78 percent
vs. 51 percent), gambling themes (36 percent vs. 26 percent), and
quiz/puzzle/trivia contests (55 percent vs. 25 percent).
Solitaire,
Free Cell and similar bundled games are the most frequently played of
all online and offline games. The
top PC game categories are strategy (real time/turn-based (68
percent), world building (67 percent) and flight simulation genres (68
percent). Console users
prefer the fighting (72 percent), sports (60 percent) and driving
simulation categories (54 percent).
Over
41.1 percent of gamers spend between one and five hours per week
playing games. Twenty-four
percent play games fewer than an hour per week and the remaining 35
percent play over five hours per week.
Christmas
shoppers who plan to buy console games for their children or
significants should watch what they rent.
Nearly one-third
of all gamers (30 percent) have rented a game during the past year.
The vast majority of renters (70 percent) do so “to try out
the game before buying.”
Of
the 35 percent of respondents who plan to purchase a game during the
Holiday season, one in three plans to buy an adventure game.
Pokemon, Zelda and
Final Fantasy were listed as top video games choices, and The Sims,
Baldur’s Gate and SimCity were the top PC preferences.
Graphic
quality was rated the primary criterion when purchasing a console game
(59 percent). The list of available titles is also important to a
large segment of buyers (39 percent). The ability to play against
other players on the Internet was not a factor in choice of console.
A
sample of 3,507 home Internet users, including both gamers and
non-gamers, were selected from a panel of 120,000 U.S. home Internet
users during Nov. 2 – 9 for the survey components of the report.
Margin of error on this data is +/- 1.7 percent.
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