The Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC) has released a new study that indicates over half of Canadians are considered gamers, and nearly half of these are female. The “2015 Essential Facts About the Canadian Video Game Industry” study reports that 19 million Canadians are gamers, which is 54% of the population of Canada. Of these gamers, 52% are male and 48% are female in what used to be a male dominated pastime.
Of course games have become increasingly available on a number of devices over the past few years, and gaming isn’t limited to just the traditional PC or console anymore but also include handheld devices like tablets and smartphones. The study classified someone as a gamer if they “played a computer or video game in the past four weeks,” and given the modern computing power of portable devices, mobile gaming captures the attention of a large portion of the population. Among women between the ages of 18-54, educational, puzzle, and word games were more popular while role playing games are the game of choice for males aged 18 to 34. While some people generally perceive gamers to be younger, the average age of the Canadian gamer is 33 — which isn’t all that surprising considering many older gamers were younger when the first PCs and consoles came out and have continued to upgrade their PCs or purchase new consoles with each hardware cycle.
However, even though almost half of Canadian gamers are female, those numbers don’t carry over to those working in Canada’s video game industry. With 472 active studios in Canada — an increase of 143 over 2013 — which directly employ 20,400 people, women only account for 16% of the overall video game workforce. Furthermore, typical jobs carried out by women skewed towards Marketing and Communications as well as Operations and Administration with only 13% of women employed in the industry in Canada worked in Creative jobs, and a scant 6% worked in a Technical capacity.
You can read the full reports in the links below. What do you think about the gaming demographics in Canada? Let us know in the comments below, or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
[button link=”http://theesa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ESAC_2015_Booklet_Version02_14_Digital.pdf” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]2015 Essential Facts About the Canadian Video Game Industry[/button][button link=”http://theesa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ESAC-Video-Games-Profile-2015-FINAL.pdf” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Canada’s Video Game Industry in 2015[/button][button link=”http://globalnews.ca/news/2455046/women-are-almost-half-of-the-gamer-population-in-canada/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]VIA: Global News[/button]
