Every year The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) publishes a report called ‘Essential facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry’.
In it they share some of their facts, figures and findings on computer gaming in the USA.
It is quite interesting to read and made easy for us modern folks by rather nice ‘infographics’ and easy to understand charts.
For those of us who are involved with virtual worlds, VR in general and gaming, pretty much everything in it is interesting but I’ll share a few details in particular just because they relate to me.
And for the record, I’m a 43 year old resident and creator of the virtual reality world Second Life and have been a gamer since ‘Pong’.
In the US women are 41% of all gamers, still the minority.
I think that the main reason women are still behind on the men is because they are still catching up.
When I was a little girl gaming was a bit more of a boys thing, that never stopped me, I was always one of those girls who did whatever she wanted, who played war with the kids next door, set stuff on fire, fell out of trees and got into fights.
But I am glad that the number of women gamers is going up.
48% of the most frequent gamers play social games.
This might be a good bit of info for Ebbe to mention in a next interview, Second Life and Sansar could, I guess, be seen as “social games” and being part of something that is almost half the entire game market sounds good.
This one is very interesting.
40% of all US gamers say they will likely purchase “VR” within the next year.
This is of course a silly state ment as you can’t really buy VR, so they obviously mean VR headsets.
There are about 117 million households in the US, 63% of these are home to at least one person who plays video games regularly (3 hours or more per week).
That means that roughly 23.5 million people in the US alone are planning to purchase a VR headset.
There are still some people out there who are sceptical and think all this will be a phase and that VR will fail again, but everything seems to be pointing in the opposite direction.
Disclaimer; I can’t do math.
If you want to read the entire report you can find it by clicking here.
Jo Yardley's Second Life 
40% want to buy a headset next year ?
High Fidelity and sansar need to dream much longer about world with only headsets , mouse will still rule for very long time. I think most of the 40% that go buy a headset buy a cheap version for the mobile phone, i cannot find info about that directly. But we all know that mobile devices are.far from useable for virtual world like secondlife. Not expect that 40% is going to spend a few 100$ for headset A better headet cost around 800$. And you need a good pc.
For now headset or HMD is still a hype. The are not for sale in stores and a proof that many people go buy real headsets is not available to.
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Given your disclaimer, a small correction:
“40% of all US gamers say they will likely purchase “VR” within the next year.”
Well, no. The correct statistic is 55% of frequent gamers in the USA are familiar with VR, and *of those*, 40% say they will “likely” “buy VR” in the next year. That’s a potential total of 16 million rather than 23 million.
“There are still some people out there who are sceptical and think all this will be a phase and that VR will fail again, but everything seems to be pointing in the opposite direction.”
Many don’t so much think VR will “fail”, but rather that it isn’t going to be anywhere near as disruptive in terms of our everyday lives as is being hyped, and will in fact remain a (relatively) niche (but not invalid) tool when compared to other emerging technologies – such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR), which have the potential to be massively disruptive in our every day lives and activities.
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