Study highlights gender gaps in gaming preferences

As much as the industry likes to say everyone is a gamer, a recent survey by NP Strategy Group shows a relatively small portion who actually identify as such.

NP Strategy Group has released its State of Play report, based on a survey conducted late last year with 3,003 US respondents. Of those, a little less than 38% (1,147) reported playing video games for 30 minutes or more a week -- the group's threshold for classifying someone as a game player.

However, most of the people classified as game players said they wouldn't self-identify as a gamer, with only 42% agreeing to the label.

NP looked at those responses split by gender, and discovered that women were far less likely to embrace the term: only 25% of women who played at least 30 minutes a week considered themselves gamers, while 55% of men did. Respondents were also given the option of reporting their gender as non-binary, other, or "prefer to self-describe," but none chose those fields.

That wasn't the only striking gap in survey responses between men and women. Men made up 56% of the people NP classified as game players, and that grew to 60% when respondents who said they only played mobile games were removed. But among those exclusive mobile players, 71% were women.

Smartphones were the most common platform for game players, with 64% using them, but they were not necessarily the first choice of platform for all those people.

Game consoles were the most commonly cited favorite device, named by 43% of respondents. Smartphones were the next highest as the preferred platform for 24% of people, followed by desktop computers (14%), laptops (9%), and tablets (9%).

There were significant gender differences here as well, with women more than twice as likely to prefer smartphones (43% of women's favorite platform compared to just 18% of men), and three times as likely to prefer tablets (15% to 5%).

On the other hand, men were more than twice as likely to have desktop computers as a favorite device than women (18% to 7%), and significantly more likely to prefer consoles (48% to 35%).

Perhaps in keeping with the primary revenue models on their preferred platforms, women were more likely to prefer free-to-play business models (41% to 22%) while men more commonly preferred paying full price for a game (44% to 30%).

In another part of the survey, respondents were given a series of statements and asked how much they agreed with them. While women were less likely to strongly agree with all of the statements presented to them -- often by double-digit percentages -- two statements had similar strong agreement regardless of gender.

Those two statements were "I am a creature of habit" (27% of men strongly agreed, while 24% of women did) and "I care about issues that impact the video game industry, such as sexism, overworked employees, and monetization issues," which had 26% strong agreement from men and 22% strong agreement from women.

The strong agreement numbers topped out with the statement "I always like to explore new things," which clicked with 35% of men and 24% of women.