This really shouldn’t be news and it certainly shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, but yes, new data from Circana shows that—as we told you in 2017—women play video games. In fact, more than half of all Switch owners are women. And a very vocal bunch of idiots are reacting about as well as you’d expect to this “revelation.”
On June 9, Mat Piscatella—the executive director & video game industry analyst at Circana (formerly NPD)—tweeted out some newly released data about who is buying and playing video games in the United States.
First, Piscatella revealed that, so far in 2023, according to Circana’s PlayerPulse (a monthly study tracking consumer awareness and engagement), a lot of women are playing games on all platforms under the sun. Specifically, 47% of console video game players, 50% of PC video game players, and 54% of mobile video game players are female. And all three of these stats are up 1% versus last year.
Piscatella then posted more data about how many women own specific consoles in the United States. 41% of PS5s in the US and 45% of Xbox Series X/S consoles are owned by women according to Circana’s monthly analysis and surveys. More interesting is that over half—52%—of Switch owners in the US are women.
Angry gamer bros react to reality
While many people reacted to this data with a sensible “Yeah, that makes sense” or “Yup, that is reality and I’ve met plenty of women who play games in 2023,” some annoying dudes had a different reaction. And no, you don’t get a prize for guessing that they lost their shit. In the replies to Piscatella’s tweets, many have reacted to the data with anger, skepticism, and shitty jokes.
Some suggested the data is wrong or that the owner stats are skewed by moms buying consoles for boys. (This isn’t how the monthly surveys work or how data is collected, something Piscatella pointed out in follow-up tweets.) All of these silly theories were not only wrong but revealed that a lot of these dudes likely have little contact with actual women or, for that matter, reality itself.
What’s very funny about the reactions from these angry gamers is that many of them are dunking on themselves very hard. I’ve seen multiple men post that they can’t find these “gamer girls” and thus, they don’t buy these stats. Checking their other tweets, it’s pretty clear why women might be avoiding them. Others asked where all these women were online in games like Call of Duty, pointing out that they rarely hear girls in multiplayer lobbies. To those people, I suggest you scroll through all the angry replies to Piscatella’s stats and take note of all these mad dudes making fun of women for playing The Sims or mobile games, calling them “fake gamers” and inventing elaborate conspiracy theories involving data manipulation and “woke” agents.
Hmm, yeah, I wonder why women might want to keep a low profile when playing online games or interacting with gaming communities…
The reality is that millions of people play video games in 2023. But also, women have been playing video games since there were video games. Barbie Fashion Designer outsold Doom and Quake in 1996 and was the ninth best-selling PC game of that year. (Of course, women were also playing Doom and Quake back then, too!) So, angry dudes online, maybe stop acting so defensive and shitty about games being played by women, and instead realize that they’ve always been here and, if you feel like they’re hiding from you, maybe ask yourself why that is.
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