The audience of Honor of Kings, the new mobile MOBA from Tencent, is dominated by women. App2Top.ru together with the company Advertmobile decided to check if this is the order of things.
The article that 54.1% of the audience of the Chinese Honor of Kings is for women was published by Bloomberg with reference to Newzoo and Jiguang. According to analysts, this is an exceptional case. As a rule, the proportion of women in such games is much lower. For example, in League of Legends it is about 34%.
Based on these data, we decided to analyze various early published studies concerning the size of the female audience in the gaming community.
What is the female share among the players?
There are no fewer women than men among gamers. If we take into account the audience of fans and social entertainment, then there are even more of them. At least in the USA.
Three years ago, Superdata agency insisted that 57.8% of all American mobile gamers are women.
Employees of the Pew Research Center, who conducted a survey two years ago, spoke about an approximately equal proportion of men and women in the American gaming community.
Tapjoy, who published the results of their own survey in January 2017, claim that 63% of mobile gamers belong to the “fair sex”. The latter figure coincides with the proportion of women among the Pokémon Go audience, according to SurveyMonkey Intelligence.
There is no such prevalence of women over men among mobile players in Asian countries, but their share is still very significant there. In 2015, EEDAR reported that among Japanese mobile gamers, the proportion of women is 42%, and in China – 46%.
According to Gametop, 52% of players in Malaysia are women. A very small proportion of gamers among women only in one country – Singapore, where, apparently, they have no free time at all.
In Europe, the distribution of players between men and women is similar to Asian. There are countries where the proportion of women is slightly less, there are some where it is slightly more. As the organization ISFE (Interactive Software Federation of Europe) found out, 52% of French gamers are women, and 49% in Germany. But there is a nuance. Here we are talking not only about mobile players, but about users of all platforms.
The image of female gamers still seems to be a novelty to someone, but only, apparently, because most of them do not believe that daily games in a headscarf or passing the hundredth level in Candy Crush Saga makes them so.
According to the Pew Research Center study already mentioned above, of all the adults surveyed, only 6% of women declared themselves as gamers. Recall that this is despite the fact that 48% of respondents, according to the same source, play. Tapjoy writes about the same. Despite the fact that 59% of women admitted that they launch games 10 or more times a week, 72% refused to call themselves gamers.
What do women play?
The most popular genres among female gamers are three-in-a-row and farm simulators. 69% of the players in this genre are women. But the number of women among players in such mainstream genres among men as tactical shooter, global strategy and (attention!) MOBA is expected to be low – less than 10%. Such data was shared in January of this year by Quantic Foundary.
Google, speaking about mobile gamers, also mentioned that women’s favorite genres are puzzles and strategies. The Internet giant also singled out quiz genres in the list of women’s favorite genres.
According to DeltaDNA, the most feminine genre is games in the genre of “I’m looking for”. If we estimate the entire audience of these games at 100%, then 89% are women.
Another genre that is very popular with the “beautiful half” is social slots. Among the players in these projects, the share of girls is 62%.
Moreover, in the USA, according to Superdata, the share is much higher – 79%.
The data of the Flurry analytical platform, now acquired by Yahoo, from 2014, in general, confirm both the love of women for simulators and gambling.
Women spend more minutes a week than men playing games in genres such as control simulators, solitaire, slots, poker, three-in-one and even runners.
According to a survey by Ladies Code, Russian female players prefer such game directions as Puzzles, Logic, Strategies and Training. Of all the women surveyed, almost a third of respondents spent more than an hour playing games – 33%
Why do women play?
Women and men in games are looking for different things. If, according to Quantic Foundary, the main thing for the “strong half” in games is competition and destruction, then for a woman in the first place is the opportunity to complete something (to collect some collection, for example), to be in a fictional world or to express herself through the construction of something.
This is not contradicted by the results of the social work of Harris Interactive, which noted that the social component in mobile games is less important for women than for men. Moreover, they don’t even like to share their game results.
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So it turns out that there is nothing surprising in the high proportion of female audience in the popular mobile game. There is only one thing that can shock: what kind of game we are talking about – a midcore MOBA about rivalry and battles.
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