The new data also reveals that 45% of Xbox owners and 41% of PS5 owners are female, too
This really shouldn’t be news and it certainly shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, but yes, new data from Circana shows that—as we told you in 2017—women play video games. In fact, more than half of all Switch owners are women. And a very vocal bunch of idiots are reacting about as well as you’d expect to this “revelation.”
This is misleading. Many women simply play their bf/husband's console, and thus get counted as "players". saying people who play on a console are the same who bought/own the console is incorrect. For example, I play on my brother's PS4, but to say I "own a ps4" is misleading.
But yes, many switch owners are women, and I have to imagine most women into gaming are on switch as opposed to playstation/xbox. There's a reason otome games are only made for switch lol.
I am glad this trend is becoming better understood. A more diverse audience means more diverse stories being told, and while another MCU or Street Fighter is a perfectly good game to release a game targeting that more diverse audience will give more options for me. I typically play games like Risk of Rain, Skyrim, Creeper World, and so on, but I have also lost many hours to Viva Piñata, so I would love to see some more diversity in the games on offer.
Gatekeeping, especially for a hobby that involves pretending you're a cowboy or something, is such a weird hill to die on. Playing and games are a part of human nature. It's something we've done globally for centuries, maybe longer. Why is this even a discussion? As a dude, I cannot wrap my head around how a woman (or literally any other living being) owning a Switch would interfere with my enjoyment of any game in any scenario, unless we have to share a Switch and it's supposed to be my turn to play. lol
It's the same terrible logic (albeit less sexist) as shitting on games that offer easy mode. Like... games aren't just for one demographic. Having an easy mode available doesn't mean you have to play it, if you don't want to. Just let people enjoy shit.
More gamers = more friends. This is good. We want this.
I agree with you, but just playing devil's advocate for at least the latter part of your comment: you can argue that there's been an enshitification of video games due to corporate mingling for a long time now, and that offering an easy mode is not what the devs have intended for the general experience and that something like that actively detracts from the experience. The argument might also extend to in general just making games more attractive for a casual audience and some formulation that the player is not respected enough to not be handheld 99.9% of the game.
Though what most of those kinds of people fail to realize is that any game, not just video games, inherently will never be hard in the grand scheme of life - it's an activity to help people enjoy their leisure time and/or to genuinely learn something if they look for it. It's never a bad thing to want to be challenged and to overcome said challenges, but there's a ton of different avenues that could potentially scratch that itch.
this isn't a bad thing at all. when i was younger, i would've loved to make some female friends that were gamers too! gaming isn't exclusive to one gender
Yea I think it's been this way for quite a while now, it's just that most women probably don't overtly advertise it for obvious reasons. I would consider myself a very casual gamer, but there are games like Tears of the Kingdom that I spend a lot of time in. So I do use my Switch often, same with the 3DS before that.
My girlfriend uses my switch more than I do. Ever since the SteamDeck came out, I really haven’t had a need to use my Switch.
I was going to sell it, but my girlfriend became addicted really quick. Which is good, I’ve been trying to interest her in gaming for awhile. Only issue is she’s more interested into her Stardew Valley husband than me at the moment.
I'm not surprised. I feel as if Nintendo's games don't serve hardcore gamers quite like Xbox, PC, and PS do, and I don't think most women would consider themselves hardcore gamers.
I used to browse twitter occasionally, but almost every tweet now has really low quality troll post underneath them. It feels like Twitter just consists of people who find everything outraging and they complain about everything.
It used to be that there were some interesting back and forths on Twitter, but in the last year or so all I see is outrage and insults.
Really? People are still acting like this? I remember back in the early 2000s when people were giving me crap for being a female gamer. The sad part is that I have been gaming probably before a lot of these new people complaining about female gamers have been born. I started back in the day with the Super NES. I also have a gaming PC, a Switch, and a Steam Deck. I also have various other consoles.
It's bizarre, isn't it. I'm a woman and I remember growing up with Pokémon, and Zelda and those 2 game series are extremely popular with women. A lot of women I know love puzzle games and were huge fans of Professor Layton on the ds when that was out. I even know a woman at my job who's into Elden Ring.
I used to play a lot of PUBG on mobile. one of the most active players in our group was a girl and she was an absolute beast. doubly so if she got her hands on an M762.
My older sister was generally better than me at every game we played as kids, especially Ms. Pac-Man and Mario games. Naturally, I outmatched her after the testosterone hit. But that's not the point here. 😅
I dont know if its actually still happening or its just an easy headline that appeals to peoples stereotypes.
Gamers is such a broad label that encompasses so many different demographics. Im sure there is a tiny, vocal, weird subset that is convinced that gaming is for men, but its certainly not representative of the gamer label as a whole.
A headline having a go at "gamers" is easy, because its not really representative of anyone in particular. I have no doubt that some angsty teenage boys have these opinions, but thats a small group within the gamer label.
Unfortunately, most of the gaming communities I looked (4chan, gamefaqs, reddit, twitter) at had a significant portion of the comments refusing to believe it. Some were able to believe the switch data thanks to games like Animal Crossing and Zelda but significant amount thought these stats were from moms buying stuff for kids. But I will say there were plenty of comments pushing back against that.
Not familiar with the gamefaqs community, but the others probably have a fairly circular Venn diagram between those angsty teen boys and gamers. Especially 4Chan. Twitter lately has been embracing the alt-right that fosters those angsty teen boys as well.
Maybe in wrong, I dont know. From my personal experience at least, which is being a male thats played video games since before the turn of the century, I dont see any of the people I play games with or have played games with over the last few decades holding these types of views. That may just be down to who I chose to play games with though.
My wife doesnt play much anymore, but she used to get the whole "woah a grill in my game?" Thing, but it was usually harmless and didnt go much further than those initial comments.
That's true, I didn't think about the overlap between the communities. What I think is happening is these guys play games like FPSes, which iirc are actually male dominated and then they think all of gaming is like that. I feel like if there was a survey that said 60% of animal crossing or stardew valley players were female these guys wouldn't be so incredulous.
No Kotaku is acting like this. There was a distinct lack of evidence in their article
Some suggested the data is wrong or that the owner stats are skewed by moms buying consoles for boys
This isn't acting poorly, this is just questioning the methodology, which is a good idea, because a lot of these surveys are very poorly done or have obvious holes in them like that one. .
They later shared the methodology, but it still isn't clear what the exact questions were.
The rest of the article is the Kotaku writer speaking very vaguely about people. Was it 2? 200? 2000? who responded like this? You certainly wouldn't know from that article, but Kotaku isn't shy about painting all gamers with the same brush in the headline.
Do you expect that in Europe or Asia the stats here would be significantly different? ETA: most polls worldwide in developed countries continue to show young women regularly play video games especially mobile games
I just posted something like this elsewhere. I'm getting tired of US-centric information for global things, look I don't hate the US but more and more countries are adapting English and nowadays speaking English has become super global, they'll just have to accept it.
47% of console video game players are female (+1% vs YA)
50% of PC video game players are female (+1% vs YA)
54% of mobile video game players are female (+1% vs YA)
For these numbers quoted: n = 10,184
For people interested in PlayerPulse:
Frequency: Monthly
First Data Captured: Jan 1 2017
Methodology: Circana conducts a monthly survey of US active gamers over the age of 13. Surveys are fielded online, via PC and mobile devices, drawing from a nationally representative pool. Respondents qualify on the basis of having played games in the past month (30 days). To ensure consistency across samples and correct for any biases/errors, Circana implements a weighting system for each monthly dataset based on representative distributions of platform use and platform investment. Circana’s models are based on aggregated, cross-product samples, and are updated quarterly to account for market shifts.
Mat Piscatella - Executive Director & Video Game Industry Analyst at Circana (NPD).
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