73% of American Households Are Gaming

A new Nielsen study is showing that 54% of the consumer base is owners of a home gaming console or of a handheld console. The 2010 Media Fact Sheet is also noting that dedicated PCs powerful enough to play modern titles get the percentage up to 73.

Of these, no less than 23% are only owners of a portable gaming system, which suggests that more and more people are seeing playing as an activity well suited for long work commutes or to fill the time spent on the move.

It's interesting to note that those gaming on the PC still represent a big segment of the overall number of players in the United States, despite the long running narrative saying that PC gaming is all but dead.

Nielsen also states that when looking at active gamers, defined as those who are using more than one hour in a week for playing videogames, 45% of them are female, a percentage increasing year over year. Interestingly, the PlayStation Portable has the highest proportion of female to male users, with 52% of owners belonging to the former. Meanwhile, on the Nintendo Wii, which is widely credited to expanding the definition of what constitutes a gamer, about 49% of players are female.

The data offered by Nielsen also underlines usage numbers for the various home consoles. Those who own an Xbox 360 account for most of the aggregated play time, with 23.1%, with the PlayStation 2 coming in at 20.4% and the Nintendo Wii at 19%. The huge installed base of the PlayStation 2, which Sony is still selling, and the amount of gaming time it produces should prod videogame developers and publishers to continue releasing versions of modern titles for the older device.