Note: This article was originally titled, “Is Gaming a Boys’ Club?” which I did not like.

A new report sheds light on the gender breakdown of gamers, and it is a different story from the often cited and widely accepted claim by the Entertainment Software Association that nearly half of all gamers are female.

Quantic Foundry, a game analytics consulting practice, released a report in January detailing the gender breakdown of their Gamer Motivation Profile, in which they examine the aspects of gaming that are most popular. Of the 270,000 gamers that have taken their survey, 18.5% are female.

They further break down their numbers by genre, where they classified several games and looked at the percentage of females who mentioned those games in their survey. By far the largest proportion of female gamers resides in Match 3 and Family/Farm Sims, at 69% each. Grand Strategy, which includes Europa Universalis IV, Crusader Kings II, and Stellaris, as well as First-Person Shooters, Racing games, Tactical Shooters, and Sports games were at the bottom of the list.

It all boils down to what motivates gamers, according to Quantic Foundry. What motivates females, according to their results, is completion (eg, collecting stars, completing missions), fantasy (being someone else), and design (self-expression or customization). While males and females share a love for completion and fantasy, males are more motivated by competition and destruction in gaming.

Quantic Foundry’s 18.5% number is wildly different from the annual Entertainment Software Association report, which conducts its own gamer demographic survey each year. According to the latest ESA survey (PDF) done in 2016, 41% of gamers are female. Since 2010 that number has fluctuated between 40% to a high of 48%.

Why the large delta between the two surveys? It’s all in what defines a gamer.

Quantic Foundry notes in their report, “What we do know is [the ESA’s] sample has a large proportion of casual gamers. In their 2015 report, their most frequent gamers are most likely to be playing social games (31%) and puzzle games (30%). Note that this is their ‘most frequent’ gamers. We can assume that their less frequent gamers are even more likely to play casual titles. So a large portion of their sample may not regularly play AAA titles at all.”

I reached out to the ESA for clarification. As a former market researcher I wanted to take a look at their survey to assess any possible biases. “Unfortunately the full survey is proprietary to our member companies,” I was told. They did, however, answer my question of how they define a gamer. “It’s a self-identified label for anyone who plays video games more than 3 hours a week.”

I also exchanged emails with Nick Yee, co-founder and analytics lead of Quantic Foundry. One of the things I noted was that his survey used a non-probability sample while the ESA presumably uses a nationally representative sample. In other words, Quantic Foundry’s sample is opt-in, from people who voluntarily include themselves in the survey, while ESA’s survey calls thousands of people throughout the United States at random. Both methodologies have their problems.

“It’s very much a limitation of the methodology, so we do try to make it clear how we collected the data to allow readers to interpret the findings in the correct context,” said Yee. He went on to talk about the difficulties of video game market research.

“There are a lot of seemingly basic questions in gaming that we don’t have data for. For example, it’s strange that we don’t know the gender base rates of AAA genres. This is a reflection of how hard it is to sample gamers,” he wrote. “A big part behind our decision to publish this data was to start this conversation – ‘Here’s our methods. Here’s the data we found. It’s not perfect, but there’s almost no data on this out there.’”

Although there’s a large difference in the numbers of the two surveys, Yee sees hope in the similarities of the data. “As with many nascent research questions, researchers will slowly triangulate on the consensus. As we overlay multiple sources, we’ll get a better sense of what is consistent and what isn’t. So for example, even though the ESA estimates 41% female gamers and we see 18.5% in our sample (with the bias towards core gamers), the underlying findings are consistent. The game genres that the most frequent gamers in the ESA report are playing are exactly the game genres we find have the highest % of female gamers.”

He also noted similarities in his numbers with other data sets. “We can also spot-check where data is available. For example, Tekken has published a 23% female gamer estimate, and it is 21% in our data. League of Legends published 10% 4 years ago, and it is 14% in our data.”

Outliers

Quantic Foundry’s report called out certain games as an exception in their genre. World of Warcraft, for example, has a substantially lower number of female players (23%) than the genre average (36%). Meanwhile, Star Wars: The Old Republic skewed its entire genre higher, with almost double the number of women (29%) compared to its field (16%).

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (27% in the open world genre average of 14%) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (48% in Western RPG’s that average 26%) also skewed higher among females.

The report warns against drawing simple conclusions. “It’s also easy to read the genres in the chart and pin the cause solely on gender differences in gaming motivations – eg, women simply don’t like X or Y game mechanic,” the report says. “But there may be a lot more going on. For example, games on the bottom of the chart tend to not have female protagonists, tend to involve playing with strangers online, and tend to have a lot of rapid 3D movement, which can lead to motion sickness (which women are more susceptible to).”

“The most important takeaway is not to conflate what the numbers currently show with what the numbers could be,” they conclude.

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