PCWorld PCGA Interview – Part 3

It’s like the Nielsen rating report that came out the other day that said the majority of PC gamers were female. These guys have obviously never been to China, because in China, it’s overwhelming how many people are gaming on PCs there, and the overwhelming majority of them are male. There’s a lot more female than you might expect in China but it’s still dramatically different than the picture Nielsen painted. Nielsen has their methodology that they choose to use, which is largely North America, and it’s an opt in mentality. NPD takes the same approach. You can go sign up on their website today and become a feedback mechanism for things that they can’t measure in their retail research reports.

Here’s the first of a new five part interview with the PCGA from PCWorld.

PCWorld PCGA Interview

And some choice quotes from the first part of that interview.

The formation of the organization occurred in private prior to forming a public nonprofit corporation based out of Oregon. We’re a 501c, which is the distinction for nonprofits that are industry consortiums. This gives us a forum for coming together and having open discussions about the direction of the industry without having any conflicts. If we met as individuals from each of our companies exclusively, there would be antitrust implications that wouldn’t be able to be sorted out as succinctly as through an organization that says at the beginning of every meeting, hey guys, we have an antitrust statement, we read it off, you’re expected to know it, you’re expected to understand it, you’re expected to respect it.

Why would you believe the console vendors numbers just because they’re coming from the console vendor? Why would you believe Sony’s numbers just because Sony’s reporting them or Nintendo’s reporting them? The whole point of this was that prior to our organization existing, you had all of us fragmented, coming in and wanting to do great things for PC gaming but none of us having a concise voice that said hey look, we’re not trying to cook the books, we’re just trying to make sure they get counted fairly and accurately.

They’re a separate, non-profit organization. Did you guys really think the PCGA would be stupid enough to allow themselves to easily be accused of bias?

You can still accuse them of cooking the books, if you like. But as Stude pointed out, Microsoft and Sony can just as easily play numbers games too.

I know statistics isn’t a very interesting subject, but most of the objections I’ve read in the comments are quite ignorant of the way market research is actually done.

The outrage that women play more games then men is particularly amusing, as is the ridiculous claims that any game insufficiently hardcore for a particular poster’s taste isn’t “really a PC game”.

All of my female friends game to some extent, whether it be Hearts or minigolf or snake on their phones. A girl I used to live with is a hardcore Guitar Hero player. Another girl I know comes to LANs and kicks my arse at Warcraft.

Oh noes! My masculinity is so threatened!

‘A better organization to do this type of survey might be the PCGA.’

Hah yeah so we can get another completely biased and inaccurate ‘horizons’ report that claims that a billion chinese people paying money for in-game pants means PC gaming is thriving.

the PCGA would be precisely the *wrong* organisation to carry out the study. Firstly, they’re an industry lobby group, not a stats/polling company — expertise gap. Secondly, they’re an industry lobby group, not a stats/polling company — OMG teh BIAS!

The thing with the “spyware”/opt-in is a tricky problem to solve, I’d think. And lets not forget, this isn’t spyware per se. The participants will have been contacted, and asked if they would be willing to participate. They might well have been offered an incentive (install our software for a month and we’ll give you a $50 Amazon voucher).

As far as accuracy is concerned, I’d take this data over ringing people up and asking for a list of all the games they played this week and how long they played them.
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Neilsen Media Research are, for better or worse, a professional stats-gathering/analysing company focused on tv and other kinds of media. They, or one of their competitors, are precisely the type of company who can most accurately produce this kind of data.

Oh, and on the branding thing: that doesn’t surprise me in the least. It was put together by one analyst by pulling data from their subscription product(s). Most of the “produced by a researcher”-type docs I see are similar in structure and format. For anything not handed over to “design” or “marketing” before publication, it’s entirely dependent on whether the company has well defined document templates in Word, Powerpoint etc. Most seem not to!

I’ve got no problem with using 97 or 03, well at least no problem with 03 (97 is severely lacking a lot of really useful formula’s / functions added in 03). I do however have a problem with the use of default colours which are a) hideous and b) show a distinct lack of imagination / branding / effort from such a large company.

The 54+ statistic is interesting though. I’m sure that percentage will rise when the huge number of us who started gaming in the 80s and 90s reach retirement age! :p

Yup, absolutely nothing wrong with Excel 97. It even had a Flight Simulator Easter Egg. Excel 2000 has a Spy Hunter clone hidden in it, too. But then Microsoft went all poe-faced and threatened to sack people if they put Easter Eggs in their Office Products… A pity, really.

Yes, you can regurgitate pc social science 101;, the only difference between the sexes is genitalia etc etc. I’m sure millions of years of role differentiation between combat and hunting for men, and social interaction and multitasking for women is just invented, and yet oh look; men overwhelmingly play games focussed on coordination, combat, tactics and teamwork, while women play games based around socialising and that can be played while performing other tasks, funny that one. Let me guess though, they’ve probably been socialised by the bourgeouis, patriarchal, capitalist imperial oppressors or somesuch other group.