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.”
It isn’t surprising, at least with my anecdotal experience, but still higher than I expected. Two girl friends of mine started to play lan parties with us since covid, and I know another that is completely obsessed with Valorant, and another that is equally obsessed with Football Manager.
I tried to find the original study and can’t. The only source that everyone points to is this tweet by the executive director of Circana. Anyone knows where I can find it?
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His company were the ones that did the survey, so I’d think it’s likely that he’s reporting it accurately. I wasn’t able to find the data set for any of his company’s surveys (I assume youd have to pay for it) but I did find this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/232383/gender-split-of-us-computer-and-video-gamers/ and this https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/09/11/younger-men-play-video-games-but-so-do-a-diverse-group-of-other-americans/. Those two articles show that while men are more likely to play games, women are still playing them a lot, particularly young women. So Circana’s player pulse survey, assuming it is being represented correctly isn’t out of line with other research done on this topic. The gamers upset about this seem to just be out of touch.
Thanks for the links, will read the second in a bit 👍
Yeah, it’s better to learn not to care about what the Gamers™ say. They love to be angry
That’s not really a safe assumption to make. Even though they shared their methodology they don’t seem to have shared the questions or the data. Misleading survey questions aren’t uncommon.
I am saying he is reporting the data his company gives him correctly not that there aren’t problems with the methodology. But even if there are issues with the methods here, Nintendo and Sony are reporting similar data as have previously done polls on the matter. And let’s be completely honest here. They’re most likely questioning the data because it doesn’t agree with their anecdotal experiences talking to women. And this is likely because women are playing much different games than they are.
He’s sharing data, that his company collected, but there remains the question of what the data exactly is. I mean, I don’t think any of us were born yesterday, and we’ve seen ‘science’ and ‘studies’ in journalism and how they’ll massage statistics and use vague terms to make specific claims. My favourite of this was years ago a study about cosmetics, which includes things like sun cream, was used to paint the narrative that all Korean men were walking around with make-up. While make-up was a subset of cosmetics, when you actually looked at it, it didn’t really support the claims they were making in the articles about it. For the most part I rarely trust anything like this being shared unless I can have a look at the whole package.
There are real studies and real science behind all these stories, but the journalists and middle men can rarely be trusted to present them in an unbiased manner that can be verified.