Female Gamers on the increase

Not only are we the market segment that marketers are increasingly paying attention to (like they have a choice?) in the auto, home renovation we are now on the radar of the big gaming companies like Nintendo. Getting the female audience into video games, especially the console version, has been the holy grail for tech publishers, but there seems to be signs that they are final hitting the right genre to lure the numbers that make developing more games much more profitable.

Recent numbers from the Electronic Software Association (How many women board members do they have? Hmm I wonder.) state that 38 per cent of game players are women or girls . Harris Interactive found that tween girls spend up to 10 hours a week as opposed to 16 for their male counterparts. Well I guess that's a good thing especially in light of a prior post highlighting the lack of sleep among tech induced "zombie" teens.

The interesting stat is that not only are more females coming online but older ones as well. The issue??? Female players tend to be casual, interested in easy-to-pick-up social games but not willing to fork over $30 to $50 for more "tough guy games". The lure is in getting girls to obsess over games the way they obsess over boy bands or shows like Hana Montanna.

So where does that leave you and I. Well as IT leaders and specialists there is a golden opportunity to either approach these companies as "experts" (being female) or developing games based on our knowledge of our likes and dislikes in online playing. If you're going to tap a market then you want to do so with people who can talk the talk and walk the walk with the market they are trying to attract. So ladies there's another drum beating out there and since you have the knowledge, then here's another place where you could become "queen" of the hive. If you're looking for a challenging environment gaming certainly, as a product/market segment has many different areas from market research to story development, project management and sales/marketing. Here's where our youth can certainly get hooked on being part of the IT industry while having some fun to boot.

It's certainly something we should keep our eyes on in the coming few years.