The Most Common Gamer Online Is A Woman

The stats are in from comScore, and it may cause some people a shock: Woman are spending more time online than men. Female gamers over 55 spend the most time gaming of any demographic group, and they are nearly as common as males age 15 to 24.

If you're marketing a game on the internet (and who isn't these days?) you need to consider this demographic information as you put together your marketing campaign. I think part of the problem the gaming industry (both electronic and paper) has been having recently is that the industry has been focused since its inception on boys as its target audience (boys of all ages...). As the market has grown to include girls (and women!) the focus hasn't shifted, which means both product development and marketing haven't taken the changing demographics into account. Which has allowed Zynga to make roughly a zillion dollars by appealing to women at least as much as to men (and I'd bet Farmville has more female than male users; any takers?). A PopCap study showed that 55% of social gamers are female. Blizzard knows World of Warcraft has around a 40%  female audience. Yet the classic gaming companies like Activision and EA haven't seemed to focus as much effort on women in their releases or their marketing.

This is changing as social gaming becomes more important, but there's a lot of inertia to overcome. Don't lose out on sales by skewing your marketing (or your product development!) too heavily towards males, unless you really don't think your title would have much appeal to women. If you're a male, get a reality check or three by showing your marketing to some women to see what they think, and how they react. Adjust your marketing so that you can appeal to women as well as men... and perhaps you can see some additional sales.