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Demographics of social games and MMOs

"It [was] found that the average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman, despite long-standing social stereotypes about people who play games." (Samuel Axon, Mashable)

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.

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