Video game consultancy Quantic Foundry has revisited the topic of player gender this week, publishing another analysis of data gathered from its “Gamer Motivation Profile” survey (which now has over 270,000 respondents) that purports to break down which genres of games women play.
This is notable because QF’s goal is to poke at the statistic many in the game industry (including Gamasutra) commonly cite: that men and women play games in roughly equal measure. Developers may appreciate knowing that while just 18.1 percent of QF’s survey sample identify as women, the number of them that play games vary significantly once you break it down by genre.
For example, among the people surveyed by QF who say they enjoy playing match-3 games ( like Bejeweled or Candy Crush Saga), 69 percent were women. 69 percent of people who enjoy playing sim games — The Sims, Animal Crossing, etc. — were women as well.
By contrast, women accounted for just 2 percent of the people who said they like playing Madden or FIFA, and 4 percent of those who enjoy playing tactical shooter games like Rainbow Six Siege.
What’s more interesting is what lies between those extremes of the spectrum; 36 percent of those surveyed who enjoy playing “high fantasy” massively-multiplayer online games like The Elder Scrolls Online were women, for example, while women accounted for just 16 percent of the folks who said they enjoy playing “sci-fi” MMO games (think: EVE Online or Star Trek Online.)
Plus, QF reports that there were some interesting outliers in that data. Star Wars The Old Republic, for example, “has almost double the genre average” of women players: 29 percent. On the other hand, Blizzard’s incredibly successful and enduring World of Warcraft generated strikingly low interest among the women surveyed — only 23 percent of those who said they enjoyed playing it were women.
As always, check out the full post over on Quantic Foundry’s blog if these findings are of interest to you.
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