A report commissioned by hard drive manufacturer Seagate has found that seventy-six percent of Americans own a personal computer, with large majorities also owning other electronic products, including videogame consoles.
In the survey conducted by Opinion Research Corporation's CARAVAN poll, three out of four American adults (76 percent) claimed to own a computer and more than two thirds (67 percent) owned a mobile phone. Other consumer products found in American households include digital cameras (47 percent), videogame consoles (38 percent), TiVo or similar digital video recording equipment (27 percent), home security systems (19 percent) and iPods or similar digital music players (17 percent).
Not surprisingly, representatives from Seagate have attempted to attribute the high consumption of “digital lifestyle” products to improvements in hard drive technology, and it is certainly true that smaller and cheaper high capacity storage media has had an impact on the popularity of many of these devices.
Whatever the underlying reasons, the high percentage of households with videogame consoles will certainly be encouraging to game companies, although no distinction is made between current generation formats and older consoles. In a similar vein there is no data to indicate what percentage of home PCs actually have the potential to run modern games and software.
