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Consoles have too many drawbacks. There is no mod community. And there is less choice in game controllers.
My favorite games are my favorites because of the thousand of mods made over the years. (And FWIW I do play them with men, women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri)
There is a thriving mod community, albeit less so since Sony took down Lik Sang. The original Xbox and the Wii have some really awesome stuff you can do with them.
More recent consoles have some limitations on what you can do and still safely play online, but people are happily hacking away. There is a ton of stuff you can do with soft mods, but admittedly much less so with hardware mods.
Check out:
Xlink Kai
Homebrew channel
XBMC
CronusMAX
WiiU Letterbomb exploit…
These and many others.
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Based on a quick scan of the [methods][1], it doesn’t seem they did any control for whether the household also contained children. Given that children are more likely to reside with a single mom than a single father (~25% with mom vs ~8% with dad if I’m reading [figure 2][2] right), that alone could explain the 5% difference (assuming children positively influence the purchase of a game console, which I feel safe making). Sure, there might be some weekend dads who have a console to buy their estranged kid’s favor, but even though they have higher income than the ladies (Ibid.), one might expect that fraction to not make up for the 3:1 custody difference.
Filing this under bad study design.
Thanks for adding the comments, @anon75430791
[1]: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/29/the-demographics-of-device-ownership/
[2]: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/07/02/the-rise-of-single-fathers/
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Btw, your commentary on the study not controlling for children in the household (or multiple respondents in the household) was what I was going to post if they fixed the comments section.
I am skeptical as well that these numbers mean what we are told they do (although if they did, it would be a great story).
Right? It seems like such an obvious oversight. So often polls are purported to say something they don’t, but I think people don’t have the time/interest/ability to dig past the headlines, and just repeat numbers because numbers are somehow objective.
I agree, that would be great, and it would be great to have some real data on it. I haven’t done a poll, but based on press coverage I think there has been a trend for games and gaming to be more inclusive (or at least for the conversation to consider the possibility that all gamers aren’t white males from the USA) , so it wouldn’t be surprising if female ownership of consoles has increased.
Even ignoring the illicit mods from previous consoles, Fallout 4 is coming next week and in Q1 2016 will enable mods on Xbox One.
The times they are a changing
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In an NPR story last night about the purchase of King for $5.9 billion (swoons), one of the commenters mentioned that women far outnumber men in playing videos games via mobile device. The study wasn’t named, nor did they define exactly what a “mobile device” consisted of, but I found that to be interesting.
And over 65 percent of mobile gamers are female, compared to less than 30 percent for the big console and PC games, says Wanda Meloni, the CEO of market research firm M2 Advisory Group.
Wouldn’t matter for me, I’ve had consoles since the 80’s when I was a kid. Let’s see…before I had a kid (and I am female), I owned several Atari 2600’s, PS1, PS2, PS3, and the original Xbox. Shortly after having the kid, when he was far too young to even pick up a controller, I was gifted a Wii. Last x-mas, my SO and I bought each other consoles. I got him the Xbone, he got me PS4. Right now, we have 5 consoles hooked up to the TV, 3 of which are mine. The Atari is currently in a box in the basement. For now. I need an coax splitter in order to hook it up to the old TV and still have the crappy little cable descrambler, too.
Anecdata, to be sure. But there you have it. 5 different consoles owned prior to child bearing.
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I’m baffled by the statement:
“but this is expected to change over the course of the next few years as the videogaming industry gradually prioritizes consoles over PC gaming.”
That change already happened some years back. It’s actually changing back in the other direction now, if anything, with more PC-centric AAA multi-platform releases (e.g. Witcher 3).
That’s great–a 2600 was my first system too (if you don’t count some kind of Commodore that I didn’t have games for), and I’d play Pole Position until my hands cramped up. But then as everyone else got an NES, for some contrarian reason I asked for an Atari XE. Eventually I did get the NES, but by then the SNES was out. Had a Genesis and that was my last console. Since then it’s been PC only, and not even that much.
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I still play NES and SNES games, on original hardware.
Kids can pick up these games for the first time and play. Good luck with whatever new thing is on a console.
Totally true.
Many of my favorite games on consoles will be unplayable in 10 years.
All disc games will probably be unplayable in 30.
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Yeah, and on top of the hardware issue, my my puny brain never learned how to handle more than maybe 3 buttons, not counting a d-pad. Any more than that and my “playing videogames” looks more like a tonic–clonic. Real smooth.
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