Analysts at the NPD Group recently surveyed 6,322 United States citizens over the age of 9 to find out their gaming habits and, specifically, what "core gamer" habits were in 2012.
How the NPD Group defines the "core" is a person who plays specific genres of games on consoles or PCs an average of five hours or more per week.
The specifics behind the survey are available here. Below, we've highlighted our five key takeaways, both from the information publicly available and through follow-up conversations with NPD analyst Liam Callahan.
Roughly 14 percent of Americans over 9 are core gamers
And by comparison, almost half of the U.S. population in that age range plays games on what the NPD calls "core gaming devices," meaning dedicated home game consoles as well as Windows and Macintosh-based PCs.
Their mean age is 30
And while younger players are more likely to be considered "core," the likelihood doesn't diminish dramatically until people reach 45.
Specifically, 26 percent of surveyed 9-17 year-olds were identified as core, which drops to 21 percent in the 18-34 crowd.
They skew heavily male
This probably is no surprise. While the overall U.S. population that plays games of any kind is split 50/50 between genders, males dominate the core demographic at 71 percent.
They're spending less than they used to...
Approximately ten percent more of the NPD's identified core say that their spending decreased versus one year ago than those stating that their spending increased, which is roughly in line with the 22 percent decrease in retail game sales in 2012.
...but what they do spend tends to be on new, retail games
The majority of core gamers spent the most on new physical games, for an average of $129 during the last three months of 2012 alone. The amount they spent on digital full games and physical used games both came in at less than half that amount.
Really interesting that the majority are still buying new, retail games 2 to 1 over digital games. When I saw they were spending less, I assumed that was due to digital distributions services that tend to carry steeper discounts during sales.
I think a lot of the amounts overall come from portals like steam. People i've been talking with would rather wait 2-3 months and get the game 40-50% off on steam rather than wait for a 60$ launch. There are so many ways to get games on sale now and with the prices staying at 60$ for so long that can really turn people off. Check out the growing indie market for 5-10$ a game now. I think that also plays into it.
The majority of core gamers spent the most on new physical games, for an average of $129 during the last three months of 2012 alone. The amount they spent on digital full games and physical used games both came in at less than half that amount.
---------------
Interesting statistics. $129.00 can buy as little as 2 boxed copies at retail. $60.00 could easily buy 6 games on Steam. Could it be possible that digital distribution is costing retail 2x or 3x the digital equivalent? Yes, this assumes that customers will buy games to satisfy some total appetite for new games each year and if left with no choice but retail, they would in fact spend whatever was required to achieve similar levels of satisfaction. The used game market has a similar effect that is more obvious. Maybe a used game at 50% off doesn't always translate into a retail sale at full value if no used copies are available, but maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.
As to the final conclusion, I'm not sure. When you poll 6,322 people, as young as 9 years old, I imagine a large percentage of those people are likely console users and moreover that many of those players don't have their consoles online.
I wonder if they removed players who made 0$ in digital purchases all year from the poll (perhaps with the exception of xbox live membership payments), and if they also removed all the players who spent 0$ on retail, then would the numbers skew much higher for digital purchases?
Can't seem to access the actual report so I'm just guesstimpothizing.
It is telling that the survey didn't count players using Wii(U)/3DS/PSP/Vita for their 5+ hours a week of gaming, seeing as all these platforms have built in digital distro systems as well.
If I read the explanation correctly, the researchers do NOT credit any time spent on handheld devices such as the 3DS, PSP or Vita. So the 90+ hours I've spent playing my 3DS since the latest Fire Emblem came out wouldn't count; instead, since my XBox/PS3/Alienware have all been off for the past few weeks, I wouldn't meet the five hour weekly minimum requirement to be a "core gamer."
I think future researchers may need to expand their definition of "console."
Because every game is skewing towards perpetual sequelitis ala Deadspace/Crysis/Assassin's Creed or going towards "casual micro social gaming yay!"
It's weird, to see the big retail games market go down, and have publishers cognitive dissonance kick in. "It's not OUR fault, obviously it's the customers fault. So instead of trying to correct the mistakes we aren't making and get big retail games selling as much as in 2008, we'll be going towards the casual market, which is growing! Because that seems easier."
@Michael Actually, you do. A critique without a solution is usually just whining. More interesting things tend to happen when someone sees a perceived problem, tries to fix it and in the process of interacting with the real world uncovers insights into the actual problem as it exists.
@ Daniel Cook. Actually, you don't. If people were only ever allowed to critique if they also happened to have the immediate solution to a problem, many problems would never be discussed. Of course it's better if both can be combined, but it's legitimate to criticise and identifying problems is surely a first step to their solution, wouldn't you agree? Whining or not is a question of tone.
Mostly I concern myself with effectiveness. You are 'allowed' to yell at a wall that fish are Satan's fry. It often is not a very effective means of causing positive change in the world. And due to a lack of personal or statistically valid knowledge, the problem that is identified tends to be weakly understood. Yelling louder fails to alter this reality.
We should all have little patience for people that stop their contribution at opinion, the lazy first step in the journey towards improvement.
@Daniel. A consumer using ANY product can opine on its ineffectiveness at solving their problems, or making their lives easier, or providing suitable entertainment for them.
They need neither the skills to analyze why, nor to waste their precious time even giving feedback. It certainly doesn't make their opinions any less valid.
In fact, they usually get no compensation for feedback, so we should be thankful they even bother, vs just writing off the brand.
I'm happy with any feedback we get. Then our 'non-whiner, non-lazy' designers use it to refine our products.. cuz, ya know, that IS what they're trained AND paid for.
@Daniel, A good analogy would be that if when I bought a brand new car and it turned out to have a bad design or manufacturing flaw am I not supposed to critic it? I know little to nothing about car design but I know when something is broken. I would apply the same logic to games, If I feel it's broken then saying so, and many many other saying so, may induce the people who can change it to actually listen. While this hasn't always been the case, as a consumer of these product I feel I intrinsically should have and use a voice in this discussion.
On a side note, every consumer has a solution to this problem. Stop buying. Though I'm an amateur game developer, as a consumer, the best way to force change is with my wallet.
In addition, the solution to some issues starts with awareness of the issue, even if the first result is often rather polarised (read: flaming) discussion, like gender and gaze.
@John Flush -- I know, right? How could we even think that wanting an accurate representation of population distribution is a good idea? I mean, there's certainly no historical or societal contexts in play that might change people's self-opinions based on said genitalia, so they totally don't matter. Oh, and the gaming media definitely doesn't marginalize women at all, and no one ever stereotypes them or harasses them in the social spaces occupied by "core" gamers. So there's no reason women might be unwilling to admit to the hobby or ever have dropped it either. In fact, why do we even have separate words in common usage that identify people in this way? (That last question may or may not be as sarcastic as the rest of them -- I leave that as an exercise for the reader to determine.)
It would be interesting to see what people would say when asked to pick a reason for their spending decrease. My hunch is many would say "the economy" (ok, maybe not the 13 year olds...we'd have ask their parents..)
My reasons: many of the big name games are sequels. The consoles are pretty much dead and my PC lives. Steam is way cheaper and there is a huge backlog of games for me to go through. Why buy at release date if I have a pile to play for budget price?
And lastly, I haven't had to buy new hardware for over a year now. The 3DS XL didnt' get a bundle with the system seller I wanted (Fire Emblem), the Vita is still overpriced, the Wii U doesn't have any games...
The economy has no impact on my spending right now. I'm not living check to check and have enough cash for my hobby, which is gaming. Even in a crappy economy almost everyone keeps up with at least one hobby. So saying 'the economy' seems like a scape-goat. Even in a bad economy people that play games as a serious hobby find money for them. Rather than the economy it should probably be stated that gaming isn't the primary hobby for many people that had the luxury of spending it on the industry in the past.
> The amount they spent on digital full games and physical used games both came in at less than half that amount.
Which actually says its not bad. If the regular figure is $129, or about 2 retail games, "less than half that" or $60 is anywhere from 1-6 downloadable games.
Couple of things to keep in mind, and you can't find too much more on the linked article. I know this one says it's a summary, but it's just about as detailed.
NPD surveyed from their own resources their people. They assumed their sample population resembles the normal day to day persons in the US. Notice that they proclaim 14% of Americans are core gamers. Meaning that out of 6,332 that only 14% qualified to meet their questions. If the article had a title that said "886 core gamers surveyed" ... you would have said, I don't give a 'hoot' what's in this article.
Also notice the meat and potatoes of their statistics in the main article, that:
9-17 are 26% core
18-34 are 21% core
So to get the entire calculation to 14%, this would been that either age group over 35 was a minimal percentage, below 2% (unlikely). Or that the population sample of the first two groups were extermely low in comparison to the over 35 bracket.
On a quick goal seek knowing the above. If we assume the over 35 age bracket was closer to the 10% mark, that would mean only ~500 [9-17] were surveyed, further only ~1500 [18-34] and more like ~4500 [over 35] were surveyed. We can't tell the specifics, but what is known is that the last mysterious age group had to have an excessive number of participates in comparison to the frist two, which most of the industry cares about, to lower the overall core to 14%.
Overall a survey that seemingly failed to find any real facts. It doesn't target core gamers. And it certainly doesn't target an age group useful to finding out what I'm sure the industry cares about.
The article should be titled: "NPD surveys old folks homes, a couple of their kids and grandkids participate"
"In order to qualify as a core gamer, respondents had to currently play Action, Adventure, Fighting, Flight, Massively Multi-Player, Racing, Real Time Strategy, Role-Playing, Shooter, or Sport games on a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC or a Mac, and spend 5 hours or more per week gaming on any of these qualified devices.
Notice that they feel that MAC gamers (while existant) qualify for 'core' gaming while Nintendo Wii can suck a butt.
"In order to qualify as a core gamer, respondents had to currently play Action, Adventure, Fighting, Flight, Massively Multi-Player, Racing, Real Time Strategy, Role-Playing, Shooter, or Sport games on a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC or a Mac, and spend 5 hours or more per week gaming on any of these qualified devices."
So does this mean that I wouldn't be considered a "core gamer" because I only play games on my Wii and Linux PC, even though I play a number of games from the genres listed?
---------------
Interesting statistics. $129.00 can buy as little as 2 boxed copies at retail. $60.00 could easily buy 6 games on Steam. Could it be possible that digital distribution is costing retail 2x or 3x the digital equivalent? Yes, this assumes that customers will buy games to satisfy some total appetite for new games each year and if left with no choice but retail, they would in fact spend whatever was required to achieve similar levels of satisfaction. The used game market has a similar effect that is more obvious. Maybe a used game at 50% off doesn't always translate into a retail sale at full value if no used copies are available, but maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I wonder if they removed players who made 0$ in digital purchases all year from the poll (perhaps with the exception of xbox live membership payments), and if they also removed all the players who spent 0$ on retail, then would the numbers skew much higher for digital purchases?
Can't seem to access the actual report so I'm just guesstimpothizing.
It is telling that the survey didn't count players using Wii(U)/3DS/PSP/Vita for their 5+ hours a week of gaming, seeing as all these platforms have built in digital distro systems as well.
I think future researchers may need to expand their definition of "console."
Because every game is skewing towards perpetual sequelitis ala Deadspace/Crysis/Assassin's Creed or going towards "casual micro social gaming yay!"
It's weird, to see the big retail games market go down, and have publishers cognitive dissonance kick in. "It's not OUR fault, obviously it's the customers fault. So instead of trying to correct the mistakes we aren't making and get big retail games selling as much as in 2008, we'll be going towards the casual market, which is growing! Because that seems easier."
You don't have to have a solution to see that there is clearly something very wrong with how the industry is currently operating.
We should all have little patience for people that stop their contribution at opinion, the lazy first step in the journey towards improvement.
They need neither the skills to analyze why, nor to waste their precious time even giving feedback. It certainly doesn't make their opinions any less valid.
In fact, they usually get no compensation for feedback, so we should be thankful they even bother, vs just writing off the brand.
I'm happy with any feedback we get. Then our 'non-whiner, non-lazy' designers use it to refine our products.. cuz, ya know, that IS what they're trained AND paid for.
On a side note, every consumer has a solution to this problem. Stop buying. Though I'm an amateur game developer, as a consumer, the best way to force change is with my wallet.
And lastly, I haven't had to buy new hardware for over a year now. The 3DS XL didnt' get a bundle with the system seller I wanted (Fire Emblem), the Vita is still overpriced, the Wii U doesn't have any games...
The economy has no impact on my spending right now. I'm not living check to check and have enough cash for my hobby, which is gaming. Even in a crappy economy almost everyone keeps up with at least one hobby. So saying 'the economy' seems like a scape-goat. Even in a bad economy people that play games as a serious hobby find money for them. Rather than the economy it should probably be stated that gaming isn't the primary hobby for many people that had the luxury of spending it on the industry in the past.
Which actually says its not bad. If the regular figure is $129, or about 2 retail games, "less than half that" or $60 is anywhere from 1-6 downloadable games.
Very bad definition. Just ask them to name one upcoming new IP they're anticipating, works ways better.
NPD surveyed from their own resources their people. They assumed their sample population resembles the normal day to day persons in the US. Notice that they proclaim 14% of Americans are core gamers. Meaning that out of 6,332 that only 14% qualified to meet their questions. If the article had a title that said "886 core gamers surveyed" ... you would have said, I don't give a 'hoot' what's in this article.
Also notice the meat and potatoes of their statistics in the main article, that:
9-17 are 26% core
18-34 are 21% core
So to get the entire calculation to 14%, this would been that either age group over 35 was a minimal percentage, below 2% (unlikely). Or that the population sample of the first two groups were extermely low in comparison to the over 35 bracket.
On a quick goal seek knowing the above. If we assume the over 35 age bracket was closer to the 10% mark, that would mean only ~500 [9-17] were surveyed, further only ~1500 [18-34] and more like ~4500 [over 35] were surveyed. We can't tell the specifics, but what is known is that the last mysterious age group had to have an excessive number of participates in comparison to the frist two, which most of the industry cares about, to lower the overall core to 14%.
Overall a survey that seemingly failed to find any real facts. It doesn't target core gamers. And it certainly doesn't target an age group useful to finding out what I'm sure the industry cares about.
The article should be titled: "NPD surveys old folks homes, a couple of their kids and grandkids participate"
"In order to qualify as a core gamer, respondents had to currently play Action, Adventure, Fighting, Flight, Massively Multi-Player, Racing, Real Time Strategy, Role-Playing, Shooter, or Sport games on a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC or a Mac, and spend 5 hours or more per week gaming on any of these qualified devices.
Notice that they feel that MAC gamers (while existant) qualify for 'core' gaming while Nintendo Wii can suck a butt.
So does this mean that I wouldn't be considered a "core gamer" because I only play games on my Wii and Linux PC, even though I play a number of games from the genres listed?
But then again, I was a gamer before it went mainstream, so I guess it stands to reason that I am not a part of this new 'core'.
Considering that the 'core' probably play games like CoD/WoW all day, this is probably not a bad thing.