The Shifting Demographic Of Online Gamers

Whoever said that online games are only for kids is either a grumpy oldie or a pathological liar

. In this digital age wherein people do most things on the internet, it is no wonder that online gaming is turning into a massive market that is changing and growing at breakneck speed. Almost anywhere in the world, even in the third world countries, people have access to the internet, and an easy one at that. This makes online gaming all the more available to millions of people coming from different countries, races, sexes - and yes, even age groups.

Andreas Neus said that online gaming is not exactly a new phenomenon. According to an online gaming expert and consultant for IBM Germany, this trend started ten to fifteen years ago with MUDs or multi-user dungeons being its most primitive form. Being text-based, MUDs require players to enter texts to interact with the games environment. Whether the player wishes to go forward or backward, north or south, he is compelled to key in syntaxes to create any form of activity.

The industrys next major milestone came in 1997 when Ultima Online was released. A graphics-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), the game was released on September 24, 1997 by Mythic Entertainment, a game studio under EA Games, arguably one of the biggest game developers in the entire world. Next came in 2004 with the release of World of Warcraft, a universally praised, novel-based multi-player game that has acquired more than 12 million subscribers as of October 2010.

So who are these subscribers and online gamers? Certainly not kids alone. In a recent study sponsored by PopCap, creator of popular games such as Bejeweled and Insaniquarium, it was found out that the average player of online games, including Facebook favorites such as Farmville and the like, are 42-year-old women. This could only mean that online games in this day and age cater to a huge portion of the population - kids and adults alike.

Providing consumers with the biggest variety of stories, modes of interactions, characters and adventures, online gaming has proven once again that it is here to stay. And as the market and its products grow in numbers and mature in themes, so does its avid fanatics become more diverse in terms of demographics. So, unless youve been living under a rock or in solitary confinement for the past 35 years, it should come as no surprise that the gaming industry is not a single-audience market.

by: Game House

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