72% of American Households Play Video Games Says ESA Report

Now, when big reports come out in some other industries that I write for, I often pick apart the numbers because, as in all things, we all want our industry/interest/work to be shone in the best possible light. The ESA, Entertainment Software Association, just released their 2011 Sales, Demographics and Data report called Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry, in which they extol the virtues of our industry.

The Methodology

When research quotes numbers, it’s always important to first look at how that information was gathered and extrapolated.

The 2011 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry was released by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) at E3 2011. The annual research was conducted by Ipsos MediaCT for the ESA. The study is the most in-depth and targeted survey of its kind, gathering data from almost 1,200 nationally representative households that have been identified as owning either or both a video game console or a personal computer used to run entertainment software.

Alright, so right off the bat, they only targeted households with game consoles or PCs that are used for gaming. So the numbers will automatically be skewed in favor of the industry. After all, if you don’t sample the non-users, you’re really only looking at households that are favorably inclined toward the product.

Margin of Error - They polled 1,200 households in the US. There are roughly 112.6 million households in the US according to the US Census Bureau with an average of 2.6 people per household. With a sample size of 1200 and a population of 112.6M the margin of error is 2.83% on top of the fact that they singled out households which played games.

The Results

Now that you’re properly informed as to how they did their research and the margin of error, let’s look at some numbers that were reported.

72% of American households play video games either on the PC or on a video game console. That means about 81 million households give or take 2.83%

They also say that the average gamer age is 37 and 53% of gamers are 18-49 with 18% being younger and 29% being older.

Of those gamers 42% are female and women 18 and older are a larger section of gamers than boys 17 and younger, 37% and 13% respectively.

The average age of the game purchaser in the households was 41, so mostly parents buying for children (according to the ESRB ratings we hope) or adults purchasing for themselves. The genders are almost equally split 52% male and 48% female.

The Analysis

Now remember, every household is different but they are using a long-time scientific method to gain these insights. However, like I said, they limited the target pool to households that are already running some form of ’entertainment software,’ like video games. That will certainly skew the numbers upward in terms of who and how many. On top of that, don’t forget the 2.83% margin of error that is introduced by taking such a small sample number and extrapolating out to such a large population.

Even taking that all into account it certainly looks like more than 50% of households in the US have some sort of gaming going on. That means at least 56.3 million homes (50%) covering some 139.4 million people in the US. That’s not saying all of those people are gamers, that’s the average number of people in each household multiplied by the number of households.

So gaming is certainly alive and well. Maybe not quite as well as the ESA is reporting, but it’s certainly doing well in general. There are far more things to look at in the report and we’ll analyze them over the next few days. The thing that is missing from the report is a split console/PC on the percentage of games played, etc.