EL33TONLINE: News tag archive: industry

The ESA (Entertainment Software Association) has published an up-to-date list of Top 10 Industry Facts about the video game industry. The ESA is a United States research agency, so these snippets only apply to the industry in the US, but they are likely to be somewhat similar to other countries.

So, lets burst the bubbles of peoples that think gaming is for young boys….

It turns out the average game player is now 33 years old, and the average game buyer is 38 years old. In fact, 80% of console game purchasers are over 18. Also, 24% of people over the age of 50 play games.

Now to destroy the male gamer stereotype: 38% of game players are women. More women 18 or over play games than boys under 18.

I do have a couple ideas about these figures, and I’m sure you could come up with more ways of spinning them:

Post continues, click to read more…

I’m starting to wonder how much the general groupthink of the games industry affects review scores. As much as you might hate or love Game Rankings, it, like Meta Critic (or Rotten Tomatoes in the movie sector) serves as a pretty good barometer of what the press thought of a title.

To spare you the pain of doing it yourself, I’ve spent the last hour watching Firefox trying to squeeze information out of Game Rankings. In its platform rankings we find little nuggets like:

• Uno on the Xbox 360, with a score of 81.9% is better than all but 5 games on the Wii and all but 10 games on the PS3. Really? Uno? The most luck-based game that ever existed - that Uno?
• The best platform exclusive game on the PS3 is Resistance: Fall of Man with 87.4%. This would place it at position 14 on the 360 chart, below Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.
• For games that are on the Xbox 360 and the PS3, the Xbox 360 version scores 3% more on average. There is not one cross platform game that scores higher on the PS3, and for some games the difference is as much as 5%. Perhaps the PS3 versions of these games are really inferior, or perhaps they came out quite a bit after the 360 versions - this might explain the discrepancy.
• The 360 has 56 games above 80%, the last one being WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2007 (huh?), the PS3 has 17 and the Wii has 7. This could possibly be explained by the 360 being out for quite a bit longer. Meanwhile, the PS2 has over 200 games over 80%.
• The PSP has 40 games above 80% while the DS has 30
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the sixth best game on the Xbox, and thus the 9th best game of the generation. (It should be higher!)

So what conclusions can we draw from all this:

• The Wii sucks.
• The PS3 sucks a little less than the Wii.
• The PSP is way better than the DS.
• Any game with achievements is worth 3% more than one without.
• Xbox Live Arcade games are worthy of Game Rankings but the PSN and Wii VC games are not.

I’m not sure Game Rankings is all that applicable to me, since my personal conclusions are, well, a little different to those.