Today King.com, one of the world's leading online social gaming companies, revealed the outcome of an industry-first, live focus group held at this year's Casual Connect games conference in Seattle, WA.
King invited five women gamers from 34 to 71 years old to address leaders from the $2.5 billion+ casual games industry and provide insight to the 150 million women who play online casual games each day.
"While people in the casual games industry have known that women make up the majority of casual gamers, we rarely get to hear directly from these women," said Riccardo Zacconi, CEO, King. "With over 60% of our 10 million monthly visitors being women, King is very attuned to this audience and wanted to ensure their voices were heard."
The panel titled 'The Games Women Play,' attracted industry influencers, developers, gamers, media and players. Attendees heard directly from the players about what types of games they enjoy, whether they play to relax or compete, whether they play for money and what they look for in the future. Points of interest include:
- While statistics state women typically spend 7.4 hours per week playing games, the panelists cited they play between 5 and 10 hours per day
- Playing casual games is often the first thing women do when they wake up. They check their ranking and play for between 2-3 hours every morning
- Trivia games are played with the family while action games are played alone
- Women are increasingly playing to compete against each other and not simply to relax. All panelists cited "competition" as their driving motivation
- While community was an important aspect of their online playing experience, none of the panelists had a Facebook profile and two had a MySpace profile
One of the participating panelists and a King player, Coral "Joy" Parks, 47, expressed her excitement for the experience by saying: "It's great that King is taking the opportunity to help the games industry understand our demographic. My typical day involves me rolling out of bed, going straight to the laptop and playing a game even before I've made my coffee."
