For a hobby long thought of as exclusively masculine and for an industry defined as being a boys’ club, videogaming in welcoming a lot of new gamers each year. A fresh NPD Group report shows that, in 2009, the percentage of female gamers who play on consoles has grown from 23 to 29%, which is really impressive. Of course, the main culprit is the Nintendo Wii home gaming console, which is accessible to women gamers and saw its usage go up by 19% over the course of the last year.

But women are more present in other segments of the gaming crowd. Amongst those who play their games mostly on mobile devices, the number of women has risen by 4%, while those who define themselves as being “extreme” gamers, meaning that they play more than 39 hours of videogames each week, has seen 4% more women gamers.

The NPD data is the result of a survey conducted on more than 20,000 of a consumer panel, aged 2-65, describing themselves as playing videogames. The survey has also shown that 38% of the total time spent playing games was devoted to online play, which is the same as last year, suggesting that although all publishers are scrambling to make online a center attraction for their games, people may not be so interested in playing with others.

Another interesting bit of data showed that around 16% of the games sold were obtained through digital distribution means, which suggests that players are interested in skipping the trip to the store if they can get a game from services like Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, Impulse or PlayStation Network.

Anita Frazier, an analyst with the NPD and one of the public faces of the outfit, stated that “Last year was one of the most transformative in history in terms of defining the audience for gaming. Even with the increased competition from mobile and social network gaming, the console gamer segment added the most new participants to its ranks in the last year.”