28% of all console gamers now female – Study

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/thesims3/news.html?sid=6212734&om_act=convert&om_clk=newsfeatures&tag=newsfeatures;title;3

 

28% of all console gamers now female - Study By Matthew Peters, GameSpot


Posted Jun 29, 2009 4:45 pm PT

Industry-tracking
（跟蹤）NPD Group
（美國調研機構NPD集團） reveals women flocking to
（成群結隊地走向）
Wii
（任天堂推出的新一代遊戲機）
, hardcore
gaming on decline
（減少）
, online gaming stagnate
（停滯）
.

According to a Nielsen Company
(尼爾森公司) study
last April, almost 50 percent of all PC gamers are female, with hit PC titles like The Sims played primarily
（主要地）
by women
. The latest Sims iteration
（重複，迭代）
, The Sims 3, sold more than 1.4 million copies a week after its release
,
presumably
（據推測，大概）bolstered
（支援，鼓勵） by that aforementioned
(前面提到的)demographic
(人口統計). However, a new
study by the NPD Group shows that female gamers branch
（分支）well beyond the
PC platform and now constitute more than a quarter of all console
（控制台）video
gamers.

 

Does holding a Wii peripheral
（外設）
cause an irrepressible
（壓抑不住的）
urge to strike a pose
?

In NPD's Gamer Augmentation（增加）2009


report released today, the
industry-tracking group revealed new figures that show 28 percent of
all console video gamers are female in 2009, up from 23 percent last
year. NPD attributed
（認為是，歸因於）the five-point rise to the Nintendo Wii
, which it
believes has attracted a large number of new female gamers. It reports
that Wii usage has increased by 19 percent from 2008 for all
demographics
（人口統計）
.

At the 2007 Women in Games Conference, Electronic Arts VP Sharon Knight
said that the Wii is attractive to female gamers because of the console's accessibility

（易接近的）.

"The Wii levels the playing field," she said. "You don't
embarrass yourself--you can grab it and right away start having fun.
... [Wii games] don't require the same investment
（投資）
to learn and to
master how to pick up and play [as other consoles' games]."

The NPD study also contained a few other figures on other gamer
demographics
.
It found that "extreme gamers" played an average of 39
hours per week, down from about 46 hours last year. Even though the NPD
Group found that extreme gamers have the lowest average household
income
(平均家庭收入) out of all gamer demographics, they dole out
（施捨）
the most cash to
buy games. Extreme gamers purchased an average of 24 titles in the 2008
holiday quarter. However, the study reported that the demographic only
makes up 4 percent of all gamers.

The amount of time gamers spend playing online has remained the
same relative to
（和...比較起來）
last year, despite what the NPD calls a "focus of
industry on more online gameplay opportunities." On average, 38 percent
of a gamer's time was spent playing online.

The Gamer Augmentation 2009
study was conducted in
January 2009 with more than 20,000 participants ages 2-65 and above and
includes data from the 2008 holiday season. Survey

data was weighted
（有利的，加權的）
to
portray
（畫像，描述）gaming trends only within the US.