NPD Gaming Article62% of gamers play online
PC is still the king of the hill (I'm surprised at this)
Online gamers are generally 25-44, play console gaming, and have 35-75k incomes
42% of online gamers are female
MMORPG's were 19% of the online gaming genre (marketshare?)
Speaking of casual gamers and game design this article at
Gamasutra (Rethinking the MMO) had some good info on MMO's, solo content, and working casuals into a game.
The article also reinforced my article on the
State of Online Gaming where I talk about the casual audience, time constraints, and keeping the casual gamers from defecting to consoles en mass. It has been encouraging to see more games providing solo content, so maybe some folks are listening.
The reason PCs are still king is because no matter how successful Xbox Live is, there's still a less than 10 million people on it. The Wii will catch up, PS3 maybe, but they need to sell hella more units to matter, no matter what their Home strategy is this week. But consoles are still in their infancy because a) most people DON'T have Ethernet jacks in their living room; and, b) these yokels only recently got on board with wi-fi (a big duh why'd-it-take-so-long in my mind... wi-fi built in, standard, even if it's just 802.11g. Cut some other stupid feature to make it work if your strategy requires ongoing revenue).
Not sure about how they identified the people they polled, but I'm surprised in that age range only 42% of online gamers were women, when it's the 35+ women that make up roughly 72% of casual game players/purchasers. Maybe it's skewed by including MMOs.
This is the part most insightful:
Unsurprisingly, 85 percent of purchasers bought more than 75 percent of their games in a physical format; just five percent of purchasers bought 75 percent of their games in digital format. Many in the industry do expect digital distribution to pick up in the next several years, however.
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