I was asked on the PIGMI mailing list whether I’d share the findings. I found some interesting things, so figured a I’d do a post or two with some observations.

First some background about the survey. It contained just six questions, asking surveyees about preferred gaming platforms, favourite genres, multiplayer preferences and some other stuff. I promoted the survey through these sources:

It’s important to point out that the survey shouldn’t be considered indicative of the overall “general” population. I promoted it through means that would reach people that already know about Black Lab Games, are interested in “indie” games, or are hobbyist gamers who care enough about games to visit a forum on the subject. In other words, the audience I hope to attract to play my games.

Oh, and I had well over 100 responses. I’m told that 30 responses makes for a statically valid survey.

Platforms

The survey listed a number of gaming platforms (such as PCs, console, etc), and asked surveyees to indicate whether they frequently, occasionally, or never used that platform for games.

So, what do you think would be the most popular platform? If you said PC, you get a gold star. In fact, it “won” by a mile. 85% of surveyees indicated that they frequently play games on PC. Only 1% of respondents answered that they don’t own a PC. (BTW, Mac was a separate option, so take PC to mean Windows-based)

Over the last few years, I’ve read a lot in industry press about the death of the PC as a gaming platform, and how there is almost no shelf space in stores anymore for PC games. The numbers from my limited survey say to me that digital downloads are more than making up for the limited shelf space. Or a lot of people are pirating games. Anyway, I’m sure that Steam must be doing very, very well.

And the second most popular platform? The iPhone, with 22% of surveyees indicating that they frequently use one for gaming. Yep, ahead of the Xbox 360, the PS3, even the DS with it’s userbase north of 147 million units, the next most popular platform was Apples apparently-must-have-have-for-gaming phone. I think it’s common knowledge to anybody who follows game development that iOS is hot, but to find it more popular than games consoles was…interesting.

Of the two current-gen consoles, the Xbox 360 scored 15.3% and the PS3 18.5% for frequent use for gaming. I was interested to see how the PSP faired, given that I released a game for it recently. 3.5% of respondents frequent use a PSP, and 85% don’t own one. Some food for thought for me there…

Only 3.5% of people use a Wii frequently for gaming.

One final observation…the least popular platform for gaming was….Android Tablets. Only 0.9% of respondents frequently play games on an Android-based tablet, which is a little under one-tenth the number who do so on an iPad (10.5%). This is pretty much in line with what I’ve read around the Internet lately about marketshare…it’s reported that Apple has something like 90% marketshare of the tablet market.

This could mean one of two things. One, that porting your iPad game to Android is a waste of time, or two, that their is considerable potential for growth in games for Android tablets. What do you think?

Until next time…

L8r, Paul

In the last 24 hours, I’ve seen 3 huge announcements that directly relate to tools, platforms and technology that I use.

First, Unity Technology announced a new version of Unity3D with support for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Android coming soon. Next, Microsoft announce XNA 4.0, a significant upgrade to .NET based game framework. Finally, Sony announce that they are releasing PhyrEngine for the PSP!

Why do these announcements matter? Because I do contract work in Unity, original games for the Xbox 360 with XNA, and I’m currently building a technology “platform” to allow my games to run on the PSP/PS3 – so every platform/toolset I use is being upgraded.

So much craziness, I can’t keep up! And that’s just day one of a five day conference!!