Michele at WonderBranding: Marketing to Women and I have been having a fun exchange about statistics. First it was football here and here. Now it's video games. Michele posts a story that quotes 39% of all gamers are women. This is interesting but it's a study by a trade association for the gaming industry. I join here in wondering about the accuracy of this figure. No word as to what kinds of gamers and games are included in the study.

This reminds me of the piece about online casual gaming in this month's Wired magazine:

Yet with 82.5 million players in the casual gaming sector, Word Whomp and its ilk have almost 20 times the following of the hardcore titles like Counter-Strike and EverQuest that get all the media attention.

The ruling class of online gamers isn't pimply young boys, it's moms - and grandmas. Ruth Lyon is a 66-year-old retired nurse in Honor, Michigan. Instead of watching Jeopardy or reading, she spends three or four hours a night playing euchre and bridge online with her son in California and her daughter in Ohio. And, since she lives tucked away in a cottage on a remote lake, she finds it a convenient way to make friends. "It's amazing how many older people are doing this," she says. Online games also help Anne Richards, 56, feel less alone. Confined to a wheelchair, Richards spends a lot of time inside her Florida home. "What I really like is that it's a place to find some human contact," she says. "It gives me a place to go."

Lyon and Richards are among the millions - mostly women 35 to 54 - who play casual games online. It's a gray market that earns companies $450 million annually, largely through advertising (less than 2 percent of players actually pay to subscribe). That number will triple by 2007, according to tech research firm IDC. And talk about sticky: Pogo's players spend about 24.8 million hours on the site each month, says Nielsen/NetRatings. "Checkers is a big pickup scene," says Frentzel.[link]

Now those are some amazing numbers. Who knew there were so many "mature" online gamers.

While you are over there at WonderBranding: Marketing to Women be sure and add her feed to your reader her stuff is valuable marketing insight.