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.”
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…
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.
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.
Bold of you to assume that a certain type of ‘gamer’ sees stories being more diverse as a positive 😩
I have always found it bizarre that some people find the option of a story they don’t like threatening. I mean, go to a library, there are whole sections about gardening, I have black thumbs, nothing could interest me less, but it being there doesn’t hurt me, and if I changed my mind there it is. Everyone wins in my opinion.
Of course gamer bros are salty about this!
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
If candy crush counts, my mom is more of a gamer than me
I… have to admit, other than Switch I’d have estimated somewhere around 20% to be honest.
But I like to be wrong here, cool that it’s not that divided!
And I’m not sure it’s a good sign that I didn’t expect this.Maybe Men are more vocal (possibly because women are less so, because of bad treatment), or maybe I’m just not as attentive…
Maybe Men are more vocal (possibly because women are less so, because of bad treatment), or maybe I’m just not as attentive…
it’s almost certain some of this disconnect is women just not participating in traditional gaming communities because they have to deal with dipshits constantly, yeah. i don’t know if i’d characterize all of gaming as unusually misogynistic, but it’s still probably really easy to find casual misogyny even in the best moderated gaming spaces–and a lot of gaming spaces aren’t that well moderated either
There’s also the fact that most people assume everyone else is a guy online, even if the users says otherwise. Given the misogyny you were mentioning I think a lot of the women who do stock around in gamer communities tend to not correct that assumption.
Why are people so stuck in the 1950s?
Glad to have woman playing. To paraphrase Iwata (Nintendo), gaming should be fun for everyone
Edit: “women” because I have butter fingers
My girlfriend has ~800 hours in Lost Ark and ~500 hours in Guild Wars 2.
She always nags me about not finding her new games. I am glad we are compatible in more than one thing.
Try No Man’s Sky, it brought countless fun hours to my SO and I. Same for Satisfactory.
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.
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.
Really? People are still acting like this? I remember back in the early 2000s when people were giving me crap for being a female gamer. The sad part is that I have been gaming probably before a lot of these new people complaining about female gamers have been born. I started back in the day with the Super NES. I also have a gaming PC, a Switch, and a Steam Deck. I also have various other consoles.
That anyone ever acted like that is so insane to me, it doesn’t even feel like it happened on the same planet. Among my middle/high school circle of friends through the 00’s, not a single one of us would have ever given shit to anyone, male or female, for playing video games. To us, every new gamer we met was a potential new friend who spoke our favorite language. Then we graduate, go out into the world, look around on the internet, and hear stories that there exist complete fuckwads on this green earth trying to keep girls out of gaming?? Like… what??
