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.”
Most Switch Owners Are Women, Gamers React Poorly
Interesting title. As if “Women” and “Gamers” were two distinct groups.
Indeed, I’m assuming it wasn’t the female gamers that reacted badly…
Capital G Gamers doesn’t just mean people who play games, it means people who’ve built their whole identity around being weird little exclusionary creeps about gaming
Valid point, but even then, the two groups overlap.
The title seems to suggest that all Gamers were male. The article mostly talks about how that is not the case. It refers to these vocal gamers as ‘some annoying dudes’ within the text. Evidently, only some Gamers reacted poorly, but omitting the “some” makes for a more clickbaity=better headline.
The irony is, this headline strengthens the very stereotype the article aims to combat.
I read some digital market reports a few years back, which showed that something like 98% of all people between 13-18 were gaming. Obviously mostly casual games, but nevertheless paying consumers of games. More female than male by a close margin.
When I discussed it on another gaming forum they were really quick to dismiss casual games altogether, despite it being the very largest group. There’s probably still a male majority in desktop first person shooters, which seemed to be the only “correct” gamers according to he kind of people following that kind of forum. Anyway, if I were to program a game I surely wouldn’t aim at the “stereotypical” gamer. They’re a minority with very high demands and very expensive gear. The whole stereotype is gatekept to the point where I don’t want to participate neither as a gamer or as developer.
Don’t quote me on this bc I do not remember the source but I remember reading somewhere that if you included the whole gaming market, women were a clear majority because of mobile but many many mobile gamers did not self-identify as gamers which I think probably skews other surveys/studies targeted at “gamers”
I have to wonder if some of it comes from the idea that casual games are generally a different audience than “core” games. Like someone playing candy crush on their phone is counted as someone who plays games, but I wouldn’t lump them in with the kinda person that at least casually follows the industry and picks up a few new games for their PS5 every year or the person that is super active in the indie scene.
My girlfriend has been literally using my PS5 more than me since I got it, gamer girls do exist and we should cherish them, not alienate them
I’m a 38-year-old woman who has been playing games since she was five years old. The myth that women don’t play and enjoy games is a long-running one.
I’ve been playing games on computers since 1977, at that time non-video games. Although I did play Pong on tabletop box (a TV screen embedded in a table, with knobs on the table top) in a hotel, sometime before that, probably around 1975 or so.
Toxicity towards girls and women in gaming is a real problem, but this article doesn’t really show that as it’s just talking about random people from Twitter It’s definitely nice so many women feel free to own consoles nowadays
I am a woman person and I have TWO switches. This is a source of consternation for some reason?
Noooo they made the switch Political !!
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I remember when they took a group photo of all the people involved with the racing games at Codemasters. Around 600 of us… someone commented, “who are all these people?”. Well, programmers (AI/Phyisic/Audio/etc), Artists, Sound Engineers, Producers, HR…
And there were women as well. Yes, that’s right, women develop games as well. There’s one of my team.
I… have to admit, other than Switch I’d have estimated somewhere around 20% to be honest.
But I like to be wrong here, cool that it’s not that divided!
And I’m not sure it’s a good sign that I didn’t expect this.Maybe Men are more vocal (possibly because women are less so, because of bad treatment), or maybe I’m just not as attentive…
Maybe Men are more vocal (possibly because women are less so, because of bad treatment), or maybe I’m just not as attentive…
it’s almost certain some of this disconnect is women just not participating in traditional gaming communities because they have to deal with dipshits constantly, yeah. i don’t know if i’d characterize all of gaming as unusually misogynistic, but it’s still probably really easy to find casual misogyny even in the best moderated gaming spaces–and a lot of gaming spaces aren’t that well moderated either
There’s also the fact that most people assume everyone else is a guy online, even if the users says otherwise. Given the misogyny you were mentioning I think a lot of the women who do stock around in gamer communities tend to not correct that assumption.
Right. I’m a woman who as been gaming since I was about 7 years old. I have learned several strategies to make sure that I don’t draw attention to that fact. It’s always better if whoever I’m playing with assumes that I’m a dude.
Yeah, I’m a woman in my thirties and I’ve played (on PC and console!) since I was five years old… learned a very, very long time ago that most people online would assume I was male and that it is often prudent not to correct them. So I don’t. Twenty years of conditioning telling me to keep my head down. Now that I think about it, that’s pretty sad.
I hope young girls nowadays feel more comfortable being open about their interests. Maybe I should be more open myself; I can take the hits if it makes things even a little bit easier for them.
That is the most Onion headline I ever seen for real news. Kotaku? Yeah, the clickbait makes sense.
Clearly the data is wrong. Switches Jane, who owns three hundred million switches, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
basically just elaborating on this twitter thread.
And because Kotaku decided to play a >1min video ad while i was trying to read:
tl;dr:
According to Circana’s PlayerPulse:
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)41% of PS5s in the US are female owned
45% of Xbox Series consoles are female owned
52% of Swich consoles are female owned
50% of gaming PCs are female ownedThat doesn’t really seem right to me, at least in the US. Most female gamers I know are either married (so any consoles would be joint owned) or play mobile games almost exclusively. Some play on PC, and very few play on any kind of console without being married. Or maybe they just don’t talk about it like men do.
If that’s accurate, I think it’s awesome! I’m more interested in methodology though. I’d love for this to be true since it means we’ve finally destroyed the stigma against women playing video games.
The methodology is discussed in the article.
Here is a tweet embedded in the article that explains how the data was collected.
While reflecting on our personal experience is useful it is important to acknowledge that our experiences are anecdotal and do not necessarily demonstrate truth.
Most gamers you know are married, but most gamers I know are not. Less people are getting married overall, so it statistically could make sense. Also, I’ve found that among my married friends, those who game tend to prerer different kinds of games. For instance I have a friend who PC games but her husband only plays the xbox. So the data probably has variations of that.
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.
You do realize women like fighting games and the MCU, right?
That’s the whole point of this statistic: the current gaming market is already palatable to everybody, unlike what your statement seem to misunderstand.
Eh, just because lots of women are playing games doesn’t mean they’re catered to women.
Don’t get me wrong, the industry’s come a long way from every female character having 28DD’s and videogame trailers being all about stoic badasses and explosions. I think the rise of indie games has been great for that. But there’s an undeniable male-coded streak that still exists in marketing and in the industry, especially at the AAA level, and there’s progress we can still make there.
@rustyspoon @dwindling7373 The games appeal to women enough to play them. Nobody is forcing women to play games they don’t like.
Bold of you to assume that a certain type of ‘gamer’ sees stories being more diverse as a positive 😩
I have always found it bizarre that some people find the option of a story they don’t like threatening. I mean, go to a library, there are whole sections about gardening, I have black thumbs, nothing could interest me less, but it being there doesn’t hurt me, and if I changed my mind there it is. Everyone wins in my opinion.
Just don’t do news about Twitter reactions. It’s nothing but outrage bait.
True; this is lazy journalism.
That said, it’s absolutely a real problem. Women aren’t safe participating in many online spaces because a minority of misogynists make it a toxic space for them.
It starts young, too. Girls just don’t show up when I make “gaming” spaces at school. They don’t feel welcome.
I get why journalists go to Twitter, too. It’s a lot easier to find and provide “receipts”. Women who post about their experiences are dismissed regularly with statements like “I don’t see it so you must be making it up,” completely missing the point that they don’t see it because women have been eliminated from these shared spaces already.
Is Kotaku’s business model rage-baiting to generate clicks? Yes.
Is toxicity toward female gamers online a real problem? Also yes.
Some of my friends get annoyed when I take that stance, but it’s absolutely possible for both statements to be true simultaneously. I want women to feel safe if they want to try online gaming, and it’s counter-productive when sites like Kotaku constantly post fear-mongering articles about it rather than offer any solutions.
Woman like Pokemon as much as dudes. Also Nintendo’s awful online experience is a plus for woman that don’t want to be exposed to weird online dudes.
This just in, “gamers” react shitty to something.
But “gamers” is evidently the wrong word, it should be “men”. The whole point is that there are a ton of female gamers, and then they equate gamers with men in the title 🤷
You are 100 percent correct on that.
Thanks for the correction.
