RonEnix

Or should I say old BBC report. It’s always good to bring these things up and compare it to whats happening in the gaming industry as of now.

Let first start with an introduction.

The initial purpose of this report was to find significance in gaming in the UK alone. Bearing in mind that this research was taken in 2005 it could still yield valuable information in comparing the difference occurring then to what’s current in games in the UK and in general.

What is intriguing with this report is that it will initially surprise those that have been in parallel with the gaming industry and to an extent could possibly shock you. Most of which are from a negative point of view as the research was lead mainly by how a “gamer” was defined in the research.

A direct link to the BBC report:

http://open.bbc.co.uk/newmediaresearch/files/BBC_UK_Games_Research_2005.pdf

As pointed out in the beginning one of the main problems, in my own opinion, is how they claimed a “gamer” to be. Reading the introduction to this report made it far less interesting as I’d hope it would have been. The last paragraph on the second page of the report explained how they defined a gamer: “as someone who had played a game on a mobile phone, handheld, console, PC, Internet or interactive TV at least once in the last 6 months”. I have highlighted the main obvious criticism here. It’s also stated that they “also counted active play of games pre-installed on a PC”, which I also have a negative opinion on.

First of all my, straight forward, argument of this one paragraph alone. What I find surprising is how they tried to expand the reaches of gaming including what I would call “non-gamers” into the pot. In various contexts this point is fine but it can aggravate most other when thought of a different way. Parents, Grandparents and other relatives may have played a game once in their entire life and, to an extreme; it could have been within the last 6 months. With this inappropriate time frame it can snowball down and alleviate disagreements just from this one phrase. Ideally a gamer in my opinion is based mainly on how many hours of gaming they have gone through in a week preferably 7-10 hours.

Continuing on from the same paragraph, I’m not so disagreeable about playing pre-installed games in the PC as my idea behind the gamer is mostly hours being played, but many may argue that an aspect of being a gamer is the readiness to spend money on a game.

Here on the rest of the report revealed more surprising results. These come to a surprise mainly due to the fact that gamers and non-gamers are being mixed into the pot as the same time.

An interesting result in the report shows an untapped market of 1.7 million people in the age group 51-65. This is one of the results which have proven more positive for the research revealing that the gaming industry other opening to expand.

Another point to talk about is how evenly split gamers are in gender. On average most male gamers dominate ever so slightly. This could be explained by the fact with “gamers” defined in their context this has allowed more people to be counted in the results and in a sense more female “gamers”.

Initially interesting as it may seem this report only provided marketing information. Although this is not a bad thing it has drawn some initial criticism on their broad definition as a gamer. This report would have been more suitable in the current generation of gaming. The industry now is reaching out to more age groups and more people who aren’t usually gamers are now beginning to play games.