Women Continue To Represent More Of The Gaming Audience, Especially On Switch
Women Continue To Represent More Of The Gaming Audience, Especially On Switch
More women play video games than you might think.
Few years ago I changed my nick on PSN because I coudn't stand my old one anymore. I choose a name that sounded feminine to say the least. Unicorns and shit, don't ask. So naturally people thought I was a gurl or at least super gay. I felt the change of behavior immediately.
In Destiny 2 alone I got revived way more often. People went out of their way to run across the open world map just to get to me. Damsel needed rescue I guess. I got a lot of invitations to Raids "Hey, we are LFG and we can explain everything to you if you want to". I got these messages while standing arround the main hub. Doing nothing. While wearing the Raid exclusive Exotic on my character for everyone to see (fucking Eyes Of Tomorrow is almost as big as my char). I got called "bitch" and "slut" many times...come to think of it, that wasn't new. Party invitations out of nowhere, chat invitations out of nowhere.
In Warframe some guy gave me an item for half the price for no apparent reason, after that he send me a chat invitation, I declined and he send me a PN wishing I would get raped. Another one I thought was afk in a mission, but no. He was just typing a message to me: "Hey, how are you doing? You new to Warframe?" Again, me jumping around in a highly optimized Nekros/Atterax build...
Sooooo online gaming is full of psychos. I didn't question that but it was then when I fully understood how bad it was. There are a lot of women playing games, some even play Call of Whatever is cool atm. They just stay quiet and play eighter with friends or with other women. There are nerds out there who are beyond insufferable.
When I was about 13 or 14, I revealed to my WoW friend (who I'd been playing with for months) that I was a girl and within a day he went from being my cool friend to someone who was offering me raid gear in exchange for talking dirty to him through Ventrilo.
Nearly 20 years later and I refuse to let anyone in on my gender. It's dehumanizing that we can't even play a game without being harassed.
I often play female characters and occasionally have the same experienced.
Recently i started a new game, someone helped me with something that I thought would take like two minutes, but it went on and on and he was friendly and helped me further. When we were finished after at least an hour, he said something which made it obvious he thought that I was a woman. I corrected him and he said "oh, lol" and immedeatly left the group. So fucking weird.
It's also funny to me because i never even look at usernames, neither in games or reddit, lemmy, etc. don't know why, but I just skip over it. So I don't even come to think who the person might be. Only when I'm in a group and have adress someone specifically I read what the names are.
I typically use masculine names when playing multiplayer games to avoid most of the misogyny. I also pretend I'm mute so I don't have to use a mic.
We used to do that intentionally to get free shit.
I have ran into a lot of women playing valorant and COD Warzone.
this is sadly how men are treated differently irl as well
edit: point proven
Women also make up 50% of PC video game players and 54 percent of mobile game players.
I find a lot of these figures really hard to believe, to be honest.
Looking at the link, there is little I can find about their methodology.
It looks like the data comes from Statista. After a quick google, they look to be credible. Though, they require a business solutions license to see the source, which is a cool $490.
In other words, looks legit imho.
I understand being skeptical, but there's no reason it should be hard to believe...
Sims is pretty popular and the main version everyone plays is PC only, but can be run on laptops and other low end PCs. There are a lot of 'I only play Sims' people out there. Could account for some of the numbers
50% of video game players makes sense to me, depending on what you count as a video game player. If, say, it was anyone who’s played any video game in the last year, I believe be about right. Sims, among us, the dinosaur game in chrome, wordle, etc. it adds up
Men probably dedicate more time to gaming and make it a bigger part of our lives, hence why it would seem more common.
It’s a survey of 10k households, US only (since that’s what NPD/Circana is).
I don’t believe these figures are even remotely close to reality.
https://twitter.com/matpiscatella/status/1667172957066600448?s=46&t=Cbb3biYQblpmbWC3J0KfQg
As a scientist I briefly read the Twitter chain by the company with some description of their methodology.
Honestly I didn’t really follow it and it’s hard to critique based on buzzwords and Tweets. The person who was posting it sounds like a businessman, throwing jargon and words rather than something coherent.
Ultimately I think that people are surprised by figures like “50% of gamers are female”. It might be 30%, or it might be something else. Maybe asking the questions a certain way biases the responses a certain way.
It’s hard to glean anything based on what I’ve seen. I don’t have any skin in this game, and I don’t care either way, but all I’ll say is that it’s hard to figure out the truth based on the information available.
i wonder what the demo of those households is?
as far as i can tell video games are not popular with wealthier people. most gamer girls i ever met were working class people.
The comments: No way, women don't play games. I never see them.
Yeah no, they might not be on your games. But having seen the sheer lust for Link, I'm not surprised switch is popular.
And the crazy thing is, the industry really doesn't do a good job at this. The numbers could really be higher, especially mobile, but the sheer number of male fantasy waifu games out there is ludicrous. (Although, unsurprisingly, the dollars earned from whales are overwhelming male, especially internationally where the wage gap is higher, so that's what drives that).
It's pretty clear that games being male oriented has been somewhat of a self-fullfilling prophecy for decades. Publisher's and manufacturers have pretty much exclusively targeted young males and so it shouldn't surprise anyone that they historically made up the bulk of the market as a direct result.
It's honestly embarrassing how long it's taken for that mindset to shift when there's an obvious financial disincentive to perpetuating it.
Debatable whether there is a disincentive, the conventional wisdom as to how it came about was that toys are marketed in a gendered way and Nintendo decided to explicitly target their products at boys only to avoid spending double on ads.
If they were right, and marketing costs were not commensurate then, we might have passed the break even point since, but that's no guarantee.
Plus it's objectively easier to make successful products for a narrower audience (though "men" isn't exactly narrow).
I can say from my experience most women I know are gamers. I'd say the biggest difference is they tend to play more single player experiences. My older sister has always been a big jRPG nerd, and my younger sis was always into Bethesda games, especially Fallout. Meanwhile a lot of my friends are into life sim games like Stardew Valley, the Sims, and Animal Crossing, and we tend to play the latest big nintendo game together.
I am probably the only person in my group of friends that does anything remotely multiplayer, unless it's local or coop.
cool. i can say from experience most women I have ever met do not play video games.
im doing my part!
Me too! But I still avoid voice chat... :P
Ugh same. The number of gross comments I've gotten on vc over the years is enough to fill a book.
I'm mainly on PC now though, playing single player games or games with my fiancée and/or friends
I’m seeing indie projects like BattleBit where they’re taking a very hardline stance towards voice toxicity, and I’m curious if that environment change could ever make it feel like a safer space to speak.
Yes sadly me too :( I play multiplayer with my fiancée or with my FFXIV guild, but no one else
so many comments in disbelief lol, almost like gaming is more accessible now hmmmmm
About time
Yay equal sexism and racism for everyone! Hope they can get past the bold asshats that feel secure being behind the internet. The mute feature in many games is extremely handy. I still get people in my dota games being extremely sexist when a women speaks
Been playing multiplayer games since I was a kid, I'm in my 30s now, I am loooong past the point of ever playing any online game without automuting everyone unless I know them. I'm utterly done with letting loudmouth shitheads ruin my enjoyment. Even games where they substitute an in-game chat with some emote bullshit, I mute those too.
One of the things I like about LoL Wild Rift on mobile is that they have a detailed ping system so you don't have to use the in-game chat (because it's on phones). It's so much nicer than PC LoL. The games move faster, so no one has the time to pull up the touch keyboard and harass you.
I can only play Overwatch without tilting if I disable text and voice chat, except with my friends that I know IRL. And that's considering I'm a guy. Interestingly enough, the coordination doesn't really suffer with the ping system
Wow I'm a little surprised it's grown so much so fast.
I guess anecdotally it's not terribly surprising? 30s. Busy af. However my gf has been straight dragging me through Terraria, Cosmoteer, and seems like Battle Bit soon. She had a lot more flexibility with her schedule so I'm just trying to keep up.
Weird but awesome
I (F) have always played video games (started with the NES and AD&D games on PC) because my dad had bought them for my brother, and they were fun. Nearly all of my female friends in junior high played N64 games along with our male friends, but now having friends in my upper 30s, very few of them play video games unless they're on mobile. And even if they do play mobile games, it's not Stardew Valley. It's the shitty ones that come pre-installed or they found through ads on Facebook. There are a few from my junior high nerd bubble that I'm sure still play, but I keep it on the DL at work because everyone is mostly frustrated with their husbands and kids and how much time they sink into games. They're judgy about it. I've started occasionally admitting I play games, but feel like I have to say we play them as a family, and relate it to board games.
The article surprises me. Although my daughter had tons of friends to play with online during the pandemic, so maybe it's more zoomers and 20-somethings?
I get the productivity shame as well. Like if I mention a game I play, then someone is piping up with a fence they fixed or something etc etc.
It seems like you're getting your femininity attacked as well which seems so strange. I just thought we would've learned by now. Like in our generation (looks like we started at the same time) I was teased (to say the least) a lot for my "nerdy" interests but now it's like most of it is vogue. It's dumb that we would repeat that with a specific gender.
I don't know if it's of any use but the majority of my lady friends game. Thru mostly also tend to be quiet about it unless nudged. That is to say that you're not weird, just awesome.
I think it might be that women with kids are often overwhelmed with looking after everyone, the idea of sitting and investing time in a console or computer game is just not part of what they feel they have time for. Mobile games are a bit easier to just put down when needed. That said I’m in my 40s, no kids and gaming all my life. I tend to play single player, replaying BotW at the moment and trying to 100% it. I have a lot of other women friends who play as well, but they do all tend to not be moms.
It's cool to see the numbers and warms my heart to know that everyone is enjoying games.
You read it here, video games are for girls. Now stop playing games and get to work. /s
Glad to see the gate keeping came with us.
I've played wow (MMOs tend to be popular with women, my guild has several women), overwatch, and am playing diablo now. Call of duty just looks kinda boring to me. I also play alot of single player games.
I almost exclusively play single player games or multiplayer games with friends I know in real life. I've had some bad experiences with online gaming and they are often way too stressful for my liking.
Yeah same, my friends list has been cultivated over many, many years. I don't use voice with randos usually.
The irony of the company that picked boys over girls having the majority of their users being girls
My wife loves her Nintendo switch and so does my daughter. I also played Diablo 4 with my wife which is amazing. I'm all for more women playing games. I don't have to hide by myself in a room playing video games anymore. It's just a normal part of my family. There are many benefits to women playing games beyond what I just mentioned obviously.
I can't quite find where it is, but there is a Wikipedia article about percentage of female gamers around different parts of the world. I can remember FPS players was few, only about 10%, in Japan more Women play games, and in average it was indeed around 50%. And this number was from years ago.
I've been playing mmorpgs for years or at least since tibia, lineage, pwo and mu and all my guild leaders have been women, with a sustancial quantity of women was well on parties and guild wars. What's this all about
Women play games huh? Name 3 women, I'll wait.
It was a joke, FFS.
Lemmy is much more sensitive than Reddit.
OK, why is this news? Is it important that women play games for some reason?
Information is good. There's a stereotype that gaming is a male dominated hobby. This article challenges that.
There's a lot to unpack here, and I'm not sure that I can do it justice.
This is one example of what happens when women are not involved in a space. It allows for casual misogyny, because men do not tend to call out other men for bad behavior, which further isolates women in the space and keeps new women from joining. Both as consumers as well as producers.
Having a more even spread across genders means that we should eventually see more content created for and by women, which in turn will make the whole thing more accessible, and may ultimately tamp down on some of the incel garbage that many online gamer spaces have allowed to fester.
because the stereotype of a gamer is a basement dwelling male nerd who has no social life and zero social skills being disgusting and smelly.
not a nice young lady sitting in her sunny second floor bedroom on her bed playing her switch looking wholesome and happy.