A follow up to Nirmalan's post "Girl Gamers":As the speaker from Nickolodeon told us in last week's class, casual games are much more popular than one might assume - particularly with women. Casual games such as Bejeweled 2, Diner Dash 2, Sudoku, as well as classics like Solitaire have gained hundreds of millions of gameplays and downloads worldwide. A May 2006 survey for AOL Games revealed that casual games are clearly the favorite type of video game in the U.S. at 29%, with strategy, action, and sports games coming in respectively at 17%, 16% and 13%.
Nielsen's Active Gamer Benchmark study, which was released this past week, has found that 62% of the 60+ million online gamers in the U.S. are female. Another recent survey sponsored by Popcap Games, the developer of Bejeweled 1 & 2 and Zuma, found that 72% of its casual gamers are women, 71% are over the age of 40, 67% are married, and 53% have children.
So video games aren't like Trix. They're not just for kids.
Marketers should heed results like this whenever they think that video games, especially casual games, are just for the male youth demographic. Online game sites should be attractive for marketers due to their targeted demographics - middle-aged professional women for instance. Since most of these sites either promote or require registration, they also facilitate more targeted 1-to-1 marketing.
Some marketers may be listening. During a visit to popular online gaming site Miniclip today, whose demographic tends to be teenagers, I was surprised to find banner ads for The Wall St. Journal (screenshot below).
Links:
eMarketer
Popcap
Gamasutra
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