npd-report
Latest
NPD report: America's gamer population is shrinking, mobile overtakes consoles
Is the video game industry finally returning to earth after years of sustained growth? Possibly, although a new market research report that suggests a shrinking gamer population comes with some rather significant caveats. First off, the report by the NPD Group claims that 211.5 million people are playing video games in the U.S. this year, which is approximately two-thirds of the country's total population. That number is 12 million less than in 2011, though (a five percent drop). Console gamers, light PC gamers, avid PC gamers, and family/kid gamers saw the biggest drop, but the downloadable/online and mobile gamer segments experienced substantial growth. According to NPD, mobile gamers now constitute the largest market share, edging out core console gamers at 22 percent of the total.
Report: 12% of US households own a Mac
A new NPD report says that 12% of US households now own a Mac of some kind. That's a nice gain -- just a year ago, back in 2008, the same stat was at 9 percent, so Apple has made nice jumps just in the last 12 months. But before you start crowing about Apple's impending superiority, here's another fact that might have you thinking twice: of those households, a whopping 85% also own a Windows computer. In fact, 66% of those Apple households actually own three computers or more. So many more Apple owners own more than one computer, and of those, it's pretty darn likely that one of them is still a Windows PC. That's certainly the case at my house (I own a Mac mini, a MacBook, and a PC), and I bet it's true for lots of you Mac users as well.There is good news for Apple in terms of iPods however: 63% of Apple-owning households also have an iPod on hand, though I'd question whether that's chicken or egg: do they own an iPod because they owned a Mac or vice versa? Additionally, Apple users are more likely to have navigation systems in their cars, they're more likely to earn over $100,000, and they're likely to have twice as many gadgets as other users -- 48 gadgets on average for Mac owners, compared to 24 for the average consumer household.While those stats are interesting, none of them seem super surprising -- Apple has a reputation for high-end gadgets, and so anyone who seeks out their products is going to pick up some other gadgets as well.
