Americans = More Games, Less Movies and TV

At E3, the Entertainment Software Association released its latest survey results.  Read the press release here (look under current news releases).  Numbers that confirm suspicions.  I'm just awaiting the day when movies are released first in-game, before coming to a drive-in (who can remember those) near you...

Comments

[Edward Castronova]

1.

Statistical Abstract: 288 million Americans, 19.6 million under 5. Assume a uniform distribution: 3.92 in each year cohort. Number under six: 6x3.92 = 23.52 million. Number aged 6 and over: 288 - 23.5 = 264.5 million. ESA: 50 percent of Americans aged 6 and over play videogames = 132 million game players. ESA: 7.8 percent of them play persistent world games at least one hour per week: 10.3 million.

So: in the US alone, there are about 10 million people who regularly spend time in virtual worlds.

[magicback]

2.

Ted,

I think this is the case of BigMath vs SmallMath.

Calculation looks right, but the base figure of 50% of Americans Age 6 sounds like big rounding plus sampling errors.

But maybe Yahoo Games qualifies as persistent world games.

Frank

[Edward Castronova]

3.

I grabbed that number from the ESA site. Looks to me like the result of a valid random national sample. Could be wrong, though.

[DivineShadow]

4.

10M divided by the about 50 or so peristent online worlds active and released listed at http://www.mmorpg.com/ gives about 200k players each. Hmm....

[Jeff Cole]

5.

Ted,

It's not 7.8% of all video game players, it's 7.8% of online game players.

But, did that 10.3 million number even "feel" remotely right to you, though?

Assume UO, EQ, DAoC, and SW:G each average a million and a quarter subscribers. Assume CoH has 300k. That leaves 5 million Americans (almost half of the 10.3 million) subscribed to other games ...

Which games are those?

ESA asserts that "43% of most frequent game players say they play games online." So the figure is at least 43% of 10.3 million, or 4.4+ million.

Of course you also have to multiply that result by the ratio of "most frequent game players" over "total game players."

Now the numbers start to make much more sense.

Jeff Cole

[Betsy Book]

6.

From a CNN article covering the ESA survey:

So-called "casual" games, usually puzzle, board, trivia or card games, were overwhelmingly the most popular online titles.

In other words, their definition of online gaming goes way beyond MMORPGs.

Also...

The game use survey was conducted by Ipsos-Insight and based on a poll of 1,400 U.S. households, the ESA said.

[Tom Hunter]

7.

Jeff's numbers pass the sniff test if we mean EverQuest type games.

If we define online first person shooters, sports games and other genres as existing in a virtual world ( limited VW but a VW none the less) then Ed's numbers start to make sense, or may be much too low if we include fantasy sports leagues, which have millions of players.

[Jeff Cole]

8.

Tom,

Ted clearly excepted FPS, et al., "[s]o: in the US alone, there are about 10 million people who regularly spend time in virtual worlds."

If that were correct, then MMO* subscriptions alone would account for more than $1.5 billion of the $7 billion the ESA claims people spent on computer and video games.

The 10.3 million figure so clearly overestimates the market that I am surprised it didn't give Ted pause. It gave me pause, and seems to have done likewise to others.

Jeff Cole

[Tom Hunter]

9.

If you torture statistics long enough they will tell you anything.

[Edward Castronova]

10.

See what you get for running through some numbers....

It seemed high to me - can anyone crank through what the right number is? I'm on the E3 floor right now and can't muster enough attention to scratch my nose.

I like to run up the numbers this way because i think counting the subscriber numbers of mainstream MMOs has the potential of missing a lot of the gray-area virtual worlding that must be happening. All the rogue servers and worlds we don't here about. You could make the case that, today, they don't amount to much. But I have a feeling they will become more important.

[magicback]

11.

Assuming there were two categories for "most frequent game player" (yes or no) then the number is halved to 5 million.

If there were three categories (frequent, average, not frequent) then the number is around 3.3 million.

If there were five categories (I tend to like having quintiles in surveys) then the number is around 2 million.

I personally think 2 million to 3.5 million is the range.

Frank