NPD Report: The US has 170 million gamers @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on August 03, 2009

News: I want to be the minority... Forget that! We're the majority now.

The NPD Group has released a new report about the video game community and it shows that more than 50% of the US population can now officially be called "gamers". The 2009 Gamer Segmentation Report is based on a survey of 21,000 respondants that took place in January. The survey takers were asked about their gaming habits (or lack thereof) and through the use of statistical sampling, the NPD Group pegs the current US gamer population at 169.9 million, an increase of over 4.3 million gamers from last year's survey.

According to GameSpot, the biggest gaming group has been dubbed "Secondary Gamers" by the NPD. The group is made up of mostly women who play less than four hours a week. They are also unlikely to own a game console and do their gaming on a PC (likely through casual game sites like PopCap, Pogo or Facebook). This is in contrast to the smallest group, the "Extreme Gamers", who play for more than 40 hours a week.

Other classifications from the report include:

"Console Gamers" (32.9 million) - Mostly male, they play around 12 hours a week and own at least one game console.

"Online PC Gamers" (25.9 million) - Mostly female, on the average they play for eight hours and do most of it online.

"Avid PC Gamers" (17.3 million) - They play, on the average, 23 hours of PC games a week.

More numbers can be found at the GameSpot link while those who are interested in the full report can purchase it from the NPD's website.