[MUD-Dev] Media: Women over 40 biggest online gamers

[Daniel James]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 ext.Christer.Enfors at tietoenator.com wrote:
> From: J C Lawrence [mailto:claw at kanga.nu]

>> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4235270/

>> Women over 40 biggest online gamers

> This study is obviously skewed somehow. There are not more 40+
> women playing online games than there are males playing
> Counter-Strike or EverQuest and such. No way. Perhaps they are
> referring to AOL's own games, or something?

I assume that they are considering the many millions playing
'casual' games on sites like pogo.com, Yahoo! Games, shockwave.com,
etc. This audience dwarfs the EQ/MMORPG and CS etc. hardcore market,
probably by an order of magnitude or more in terms of number of
players. These folks generally play a lot less, but even the
simultaneous numbers are, I would estimate, 5x or more of the
hardcore games. It would appear that the majority of these casual
players are women, I believe that this has been long reflected in
the demographics from most casual gaming sites.

That said I don't know the details of AOL's methodology in this
case, and they may well have booched the survey by, for example,
compeltely ignoring the hardcore market. In particular I suspect
that the age data may be a little skewed, perhaps by who is prepared
to be surveyed. However, we are seeing a lot of these women playing
Puzzle Pirates, so I can give anecdotal evidence that they exist
and, uh, like puzzling.

- Daniel
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev