The Entertainment Software Association puts out a PDF every year with a variety of gamer statistics, such as average age, gender, and so on. I started looking them up in support of an argument I was going to make, realized the data might have proven the exact opposite thing, then decided “what the hell” and tossed it up into a Google Doc. Here are some simple graphs that may or may not prove useful to someone, somewhere:

Hmm.

As you might notice, the average age of gamers plummeted in 2012. This was a result of the ESA changing the wording of their questionnaire, turning anyone who played one hour per week of a game on a smartphone or iPad into a “gamer.” Incidentally, people who played 10 hours per week were considered “serious gamers,” which I believe automatically applies to anyone who has ever played an MMO. It’s kinda funny though, in that playing games more than an 1.5 hours/day is “serious,” but (Americans) watching more than 5 hours of live TV a day is average. Casuals, indeed.

Getting older? Maybe.

The above chart is a breakdown of the three age ranges into percentages of the whole. This is where my original argument got tripped up. You see, I was trying to refute the “these days gamers are getting older/having kids/etc and thus have less time to play” argument. I mean, it makes sense as a talking point when speaking to one’s own peer group, but the average number of years a person has been gaming hasn’t increased all that much (see chart 1). In this chart however, it’s pretty clear that the under-18 crowd went from about 35% of all gamers down to sub-20% across seven years. So yeah, maybe we’re all growing up. Or more older non-gamers are joining, which may as well be the same thing.

If you are wondering what happened to 2012-2014 numbers, well, the ESA decided change the age ranges for basically no reason. Seriously, under-18, 18-35, and 36+? I mean, I guess that isolates the COD crew better? I’m not going to bother with a graph for just those three years though, so here is a table:

I included the 2003 data in there simply because it happened to have those same age ranges on it.

Finally, here is a gender chart for the curious:

We’ve come a long way.

And there you go. Hopefully that was useful to someone, somewhere. If you want to see the figures yourself, the Google Doc includes links to all 14 PDFs. Go nuts.