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Gamer Demographics Over Time
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:
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.
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:
Under-18 | 18-35 | 36+ | |
---|---|---|---|
2003 | 37.9% | 39.5% | 22.7% |
2012 | 32% | 31% | 37% |
2013 | 32% | 32% | 36% |
2014 | 29% | 32% | 39% |
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:
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.