It seems that tablets with their large screen have become a very friendly medium for gaming. A study from Flurry has found that smartphone owners spend as much as 39% of their time playing games, while tablet owners spent a rather large 67% of their time gaming on their device.
For both phones and tablets, social networking is a distant second, with mobile users spending 24% of their time, and tablet users spending 10% of their time on such activities. What’s more interesting is that tablet users spend only 1% of the time on productivity applications, which is often touted as a big selling point for tablets over phones.
Dedicated portable gaming devices such as the Sony PlayStation Vita, and Nintendo 3DS have been around for a long time, however with the combination of the portability, screen size and the power of tablets, makes them quite suitable as portable gaming devices. This combined with the fact that they are capable of being much more than gaming devices, makes them much more lucrative for consumers.
It’s not really surprising that many people play games even though mainstream game developers have, for a long time, maintained a narrow view of what constitutes a gamer—usually such a young and white American male—and as such targeted only that demographic. Unfortunately when you make something that heavily targets a particular demographic, it should not come as a surprise when that demographic becomes the primary consumer.
While tablet and mobile games are often derided as “casual” and hence not “real” gaming, the fact is that gaming is a hobby enjoyed by many in different quantities. Just like movies are watched by a spectrum of people from those who make weekly (or more frequent) visits to the cinema to those who watch the occasional film once a year; there is spectrum of people that play games, from those who invest in expensive gaming rigs and multiple consoles and spend hours gaming each day, to those that play a bit of Angry Birds on their commute. Indie developers flocked to these new devices and found a new audience, as is evident from this report.
If you are a game developer, you owe it to yourself to ask yourself, are you making games for young boys because they are the only people who play games, or are young boys the only people who pay your games because you make games only for them. Gamers exit all around the world, and are of all kinds of backgrounds and genders.
For a developer it is important to know that the audience is out there, and they want more games. These aren’t just teenage boys but men and women, girls and boys of all ages. If you target a broader audience you will be pleasantly surprised to find that there is world of people out there and they all looking for interesting gaming experiences.
(via GameIndustry.biz)
