Popcap Social Gaming Research: the wrong way?
A recent research about social gaming was conducted by Information Solutions Group for the american casual game developer/publisher, Popcap Games. Survey has been completed by United States and United Kingdom members of Toluna’s Internet ePanel between 7th and 12th january 2010. Of the 1202 respondents, 900 were from the US (67%), while 402 were from the UK (33%).
Here are some selected informations about it:
—> 58% of social game players in the UK are women, as are 54% of those in the US.
—> There is two big major categories of social game players: single people with no children (28%) and married people with children living at home (28%).
—> Social game players’ average age in the UK is 38, which is far more younger than the 48 year old average in the US. As you can see on the graph below, 46% of americans are 50 or older, that is twice as much as UK players (23%), whereas only 15% of americans are under the age of 30, while they are twice as much in UK (31%).
—> Housewives are commonly thought to be the main target of casual and social game, but the numbers show that only 11% of the respondents are homemakers and 41% work full time.
—> The top three reason motivating people to play social games are the fun and excitment they get, followed by playing as a stress-reliever and enjoying the competitive spirit.
—> 49% of social game players said that when they connect to social networks, they do so specifically to play social games. In addition, Facebook is by far the most popular web platform destination to play social games (83% of respondents said they play games there, compared to Myspace which is in second place with only 24%).
—> 47% of social gamers said they are very unlikely to purchase virtual items with real money, with only 9% saying they are very likely. Women are more unwilling to purchase virtual items with real money (54% said “very unlikely”) than men (38%).
Many others informations can be found in this paper and if you feel concern about it or if you are just curious, you can find the full document online at Information Solutions Group website.
However beyond all these appealing datas, there are some fuzzy points I would like to mention :
The first one is about their use of the term “social game”. It is probably an academic remark, but they never offer a word of definition in their study. They are defining who are social game players without any explanation about what are social games. Acccording to the replies they get with their survey, “social game” stands for social network games such as FarmVille on Facebook or Mafia Wars on Myspace. So we assume this term is understood as a mix between multiplayer and casual games, mostly perform on social network (even if we can roughly doubt of it when we see that Bejeweled Blitz is, according to their results: “the most popular game among social gamers” – as I’m currently writing this article, Bejeweled Blitz gathers around 10 millions monthly active users against Farmville with more than 80 millions).
My second point is all about the age of the respondents. According to the numbers, the average age is around 43, but is it reality? When we take a closer look to the age of their respondents we notice that people between the age of 18 and 30 are only 231 (19% of their panel population), people between 30 and 50 are 499 (42%) and people older than 50 are 462 (39%). In my opinion, we can seriously question the lack of young players representation. Because the online survey was completed by members of Toluna’s Internet ePanel players under 18 wasn’t really a part of it. To not count this young audience is probably the biggest mistake of this research. I think we can firmly argue there is a wide number of players between 13 and 25 who are involved and concerned in “social gaming” as much as they are not huge part of social network (last year 55% of Facebookâs US audience was under the age of 26).
In my opinion, the reality behind this research is distorted because it ignores an important part of the youngest audience. It’s an important lack which needs to be emphasized in order to avoid it as much as possible for any future researches about social games and their players.
7th
Posted in Non-classified | 
Tags: facebook, game, gender, Information Solutions Groupe, Popcap, social game, social network, survey, Toluna
“It is probably an academic remark, but they never offer a word of definition in their study. They are defining who are social game players without any explanation about what are social games.”
I disagree about it being probably academic. If there’s no operational definition of what a “social game” is, it kind of calls into question how well you actually hit your target audience, doesn’t it?
I’m kinda of surprised a 73 page research study on social gaming players didn’t seem to bother to define what a social game is.
Indeed, the main problem of this “study” is all about the definition of the object they are investigating. I almost didn’t see any remarks or critics on the web about this major part of the document. The study has been shared through the entire web and everybody seems to be happy with numbers regardless of their meaning…
Thank you very much for this Simon, and the caveat about the survey. To compare the panel data with the UK population figures:
15-30 years old: 19%
30-50 years old: 29%
Over 50 years old: 26%
Thought it would be useful as a comparison for the panel figures. As you said, they are not exactly representative.
Except for the under 18’s who were not surveyed, I wonder if they weighted the results to population figures?
Thanks for these interesting numbers Melanie. I share you thought that it would be useful to compare. As far as I remember, they did not try to weight their panel to the UK population figures. Actually for this survey they had 499 people who were 30-50 years old and 462 people who were over 50 years old.