The new data also reveals that 45% of Xbox owners and 41% of PS5 owners are female, too
This really shouldn’t be news and it certainly shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, but yes, new data from Circana shows that—as we told you in 2017—women play video games. In fact, more than half of all Switch owners are women. And a very vocal bunch of idiots are reacting about as well as you’d expect to this “revelation.”
I’m a 38-year-old woman who has been playing games since she was five years old. The myth that women don’t play and enjoy games is a long-running one.
I’ve been playing games on computers since 1977, at that time non-video games. Although I did play Pong on tabletop box (a TV screen embedded in a table, with knobs on the table top) in a hotel, sometime before that, probably around 1975 or so.
Most Switch Owners Are Women, Gamers React Poorly
Interesting title. As if “Women” and “Gamers” were two distinct groups.
Indeed, I’m assuming it wasn’t the female gamers that reacted badly…
Capital G Gamers doesn’t just mean people who play games, it means people who’ve built their whole identity around being weird little exclusionary creeps about gaming
Valid point, but even then, the two groups overlap.
The title seems to suggest that all Gamers were male. The article mostly talks about how that is not the case. It refers to these vocal gamers as ‘some annoying dudes’ within the text. Evidently, only some Gamers reacted poorly, but omitting the “some” makes for a more clickbaity=better headline.
The irony is, this headline strengthens the very stereotype the article aims to combat.
Toxicity towards girls and women in gaming is a real problem, but this article doesn’t really show that as it’s just talking about random people from Twitter It’s definitely nice so many women feel free to own consoles nowadays
My girlfriend has been literally using my PS5 more than me since I got it, gamer girls do exist and we should cherish them, not alienate them
That is the most Onion headline I ever seen for real news. Kotaku? Yeah, the clickbait makes sense.
I am glad this trend is becoming better understood. A more diverse audience means more diverse stories being told, and while another MCU or Street Fighter is a perfectly good game to release a game targeting that more diverse audience will give more options for me. I typically play games like Risk of Rain, Skyrim, Creeper World, and so on, but I have also lost many hours to Viva Piñata, so I would love to see some more diversity in the games on offer.
You do realize women like fighting games and the MCU, right?
That’s the whole point of this statistic: the current gaming market is already palatable to everybody, unlike what your statement seem to misunderstand.
basically just elaborating on this twitter thread.
And because Kotaku decided to play a >1min video ad while i was trying to read:
tl;dr:
According to Circana’s PlayerPulse:
47% of console video game players are female (+1% vs YA)
50% of PC video game players are female (+1% vs YA)
54% of mobile video game players are female (+1% vs YA)41% of PS5s in the US are female owned
45% of Xbox Series consoles are female owned
52% of Swich consoles are female owned
50% of gaming PCs are female ownedThat doesn’t really seem right to me, at least in the US. Most female gamers I know are either married (so any consoles would be joint owned) or play mobile games almost exclusively. Some play on PC, and very few play on any kind of console without being married. Or maybe they just don’t talk about it like men do.
If that’s accurate, I think it’s awesome! I’m more interested in methodology though. I’d love for this to be true since it means we’ve finally destroyed the stigma against women playing video games.
The methodology is discussed in the article.
Here is a tweet embedded in the article that explains how the data was collected.
While reflecting on our personal experience is useful it is important to acknowledge that our experiences are anecdotal and do not necessarily demonstrate truth.
If candy crush counts, my mom is more of a gamer than me
Among my personal friends, probably the same ratio of men and women are into Souls games. So like… yeah, women play games. And not just “lady-friendly” fare. As a non-woman, I freaking love Animal Crossing; meanwhile my wife has beaten most of the Souls games and I’ve given up on all of them. Anecdotal, but like… gamers like gaming, and I feel like these days trying to say anything about game preference and gender is just not really helpful.
Of course gamer bros are salty about this!
Woman like Pokemon as much as dudes. Also Nintendo’s awful online experience is a plus for woman that don’t want to be exposed to weird online dudes.
Clearly the data is wrong. Switches Jane, who owns three hundred million switches, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
I would not trust Kotaku.
I remember when they took a group photo of all the people involved with the racing games at Codemasters. Around 600 of us… someone commented, “who are all these people?”. Well, programmers (AI/Phyisic/Audio/etc), Artists, Sound Engineers, Producers, HR…
And there were women as well. Yes, that’s right, women develop games as well. There’s one of my team.
This just in, “gamers” react shitty to something.
But “gamers” is evidently the wrong word, it should be “men”. The whole point is that there are a ton of female gamers, and then they equate gamers with men in the title 🤷
You are 100 percent correct on that.
Thanks for the correction.
