There’s a very interesting article in the December 17 issue of Marketing Magazine (Rogers Publishing) about the next generation of video game marketing. Titled “Video game marketing 2.0”, Alicia Androich writes about many interesting statistics including the way people share information regarding games.
We think you should read the article – which is also available on Newsstand, by the way (iTunes link) – but there are a few things we wanted to highlight that really jumped out at us.
The article says that male gamers spend about eight hours per week gaming, and that most of this tends to take place on more traditional platforms like Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. Female gamers spend just over half of that time online at about five hours, but they play mostly through online platforms such as Steam and Nintendo’s Wii console.
Teen gamers, which we expect includes male and female gamers alike, spend about ten hours per week in front of a video game of some sort, a number that has actually increased, despite the studies we’ve seen that say the numbers are declining as people use more technology on the go.
These numbers should continue to rise as companies invest more and more into gaming as well as marketing them. There is a 7.1% annual increase projected for wireless games as the casual games market gets a boost from investors. We actually think this number is a tad on the small side given the explosion in mobile growth, but it is possible that Androich is citing the cooling-off period now that the big boom of mobile apps has occurred.
In Canadian gaming specifically, our market is expected to grow about 5.3% on an annual basis from 2011 to 2016, showing growth of about a half billion dollars over the next few years. That’s pretty huge when you consider that Canada is certainly not the biggest gaming community on the planet. Though we would argue that we are some of the best.
Do yourself a favour and have a read through the good chunks of Alicia Androich’s article. There is a lot more meat to the piece than we’re letting on to, and it really helps to know that people are paying attention to what is happening in the gaming industry.