Move Over Boys! Women Take the Lead in the Games Markets

Gone are the days where gaming was the reserve of the spotty teenager locked in a darkened bedroom, new research by comScore has proven that the fast growing games users are female. This may not appear too surprising to many who see simulation games, and the Nintendo DS fill their shelves with games such as Nintendogs, Bratz and Simanimals. But what is interesting is that that although the 12-17 age group has seen the fastest growth, it is closely followed by the 55-64 age group, who we presume are not all looking after their Nintendogs.

The numbers of players in the 55-64 years age group grew over three times faster than the remaining age group segments. ComScore suggests that thisdue to partnerships between traditionally female content community sites, such as iVillage, and games sites such as Pogos. However, all of nintendo's marketing for the DS games such as brain training, suduko and others always features a strong proportion of more mature players in their advertising campaigns.

So is this unexpected? I would suggest that no. If we go back in time, to before the web occupied huge amounts of our free personal time, then it was traditionally the mature women who were the biggest buyers of crossword, wordsearch & other puzzle books. All we are seeing here is the continued shift in the "upgrading" to more modern platforms.

"Teach your grannie to text" was a suggestion put forward by a group of Schoolchildren when asked how to improve the world. And infact, what this research shows is that not only is grannie texting, but she'll be fighting you for your x-box on Christmas morning!

This article has is part of a series on the Fantasy Couriers Blog at http://fantasycouriers.wordpress.com

Companies interested in advertising their products in our game please visit our website http://www.fantasycouriers.com for more information.

AP - People with low cholesterol and no big risk for heart disease dramatically lowered their chances of dying or having a heart attack if they took the cholesterol pill Crestor, a large study found.