72 Percent of the U.S. are Gamers According to NPD

NPD, the company famous for tracking sales statistics on video games and video game consoles month after month, has released their annual study on how many Americans are gamers. The results may surprise you.

This latest study has found that a surprising 72 percent of the U.S. play video games which is up from 64 percent from their last study a year ago. Of those 72 percent, half or 36 percent of them play online games which is up only a couple percent from last year. Perhaps Reuters has an answer as to why such a difference between offline and online gaming, They found in recent study that one third of Americans aren’t online at all, see no point in the Internet and have no plans to jack into it, that’s some 31 million homes! Although the US being 2nd worst in Internet bandwidth for the price probably doesn't help this situation much either.

When it comes to online gaming, the PC is king with 90 percent of online gamers playing on a PC. Who said PC gaming was dead? 19 percent of online gamers are console gamers and 3 percent play on their cellphones which is an emerging market for gaming. Casual games played on a cellphone is the popular choice for women gamers.

To break down the 19 percent of gamers that use consoles into which consoles they are using, the Xbox 360 is king with 50 percent but Xbox 360 gamers spent the most number of hours playing games online. The other 50 percent was split between the PS3, Wii and handhelds consoles.

The Wii60 fan promotion doesn’t really seem to have caught on though. Only three percent of gamers own two of the next gen consoles and only two percent own all three next gen consoles. For the most part it looks like gamers have an allegiance to one console and that’s what they stick with.

Overall it looks like a very positive audience growth for the gaming industry and dare we say that gaming is finally a main stream activity?