Pew study tells us nothing new, there are women gamers

According to a recent survey conducted by Pew Research, there are more women gamers than men.

Researchers asked approximately 2,000 adults about what electronics they owned. 42% of women said they had a console compared to 37% of men.

Some gaming pundits were certainly seem taken aback by this result. There are still a lot of people, even in the community, who think gaming is the sole domain of sweaty nerds and dude bros. For those of us who have been around a while, this should come as no surprise.

Video games have been in the mainstream for about a decade now. As ReviewTechUSA pointed out in his video, gaming is a form of entertainment like any other now. It tends to offer a bigger bang for buck than movies and pay TV. So why wouldn’t women be buying consoles? They’re buying every other modern electronic device.

As the survey also points out, game console ownership between demographics has remained fairly flat over the last five years. So yes, ladies are playing and they have been for a long time.

So what does this mean for the industry? Well, women gamers are not an insignificant demographic for one. Developers tend to focus too heavily on the teenage male demographic. Yet they’re not the ones buying. With a higher percentage of adults across the board playing video games, hopefully this will mean a return to a wider variety of options. Especially on consoles, which tend to be dominated by the same dude bro trash and annual releases.

Of course, I do tend to question Pew’s methodology when they listed the Sega Genesis as a current portable system.

Feature Image by wlodi, via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License 2.0.