Study: U.S. gaming population has nearly tripled in three years
The number of people playing video games in the U.S. has risen 241 percent since 2008, according to a new study from market research and consulting company Parks Associates.
Why is this important to the realm of HTML5 Game Development? Well, to quote my own article from last year’s UX Magazine:
Games have come a long way since the 1980s when Gamers – in the modern video game sense – were a young, fringe lot. The intervening thirty years have changed the gaming demographic drastically. Gamers no longer exist as a subset of society. Nearly everyone games. The average social gamer, according to a survey from early 2010, is a forty-three year old woman – not the stereotypical pimply face teenager.
As web based game developers, you have a vastly expanding demographic that is hungry for more than just traditional-genre game fair. Expanding the horizons of what constitutes a game (much like farmville did a few years ago) will help snap up the new ever broadening game-playing user base.