Monthly Archives: February

Information Sercices Group has been commissioned by Popcap Games to perform a survey of the demographics of players of social games. The findings:

“55% of social gamers are female and 45% are male. Females are more avid gamers, too; 38% of females said they play multiple times a day, but just 29% males said the same. Women are more likely to play with people they know (68% vs. 56% for males), and men are more likely to play with strangers (41% vs. 33%) than women are…
There were more insights in the survey beyond gender. Facebook is the most popular destination for online games, with 83% of respondents saying they have played games there. Twenty-eight percent have purchased in-game currency with real-world money. The average gamer has played six social games, and more than 50% of gamers started playing a game because a friend recommended it or because they saw a friend playing it in a news feed or other social stream.“

Compare this to the player demographics of MMOs (as reported by the great Daedalus Project, Gamasutra and BBC, among others), where “the most hard-core players are female… Despite gaming being seen as a male activity, female players now make up about 40% of the gaming population.“

Females thusly account for a 15 percent higher proportion of players of social games in comparison to the audience of MMOs—they do seem to hit a nerve of a female audience a bit better than the standard formulas of traditional MMOs.

Engage Digital has published a virtual goods forecast for 2010, based on responses from over 30 industry executives, analysts and observers. The key-findings are:

“The amount of money spent of virtual goods will rise…
Triple-A brands will invade the virtual goods marketplace in order to tap the appeal with an increasingly broad consumer base, as a means to drive reach and engagement (though not necessarily revenues).
As the virtual goods marketplace reduces friction among buyers and draws more participants along the entire value chain (more goods creators, more infrastructure solutions, more dollars), it will inevitably draw greater scrutiny from government regulators and also be the driver of disputes that will end up in court—either seeking redress or prompting regulation… 

Among the most basic views of the sector is that it is bound to grow in terms of how much consumers are willing to spend on digital good.“

The PDF can be downloaded here.

via Virtual World News