CEA Report Suggests Adults Play More Than Teens

A new report by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) suggests that adult gamers spend more time playing video games each week than their teenage counterparts. The “2006 Gaming Technology Study” suggests that different age groups of gamer exhibit very different preferences and behavior, with one third of adults spending ten hours or more playing games each week, compared to just eleven percent of teenagers. Teenagers between twelve and fourteen years of age however were found to spend more time playing games than those between fifteen and seventeen. The report speculates that older teens either have less free time or are playing on wireless handsets - with eighty-one percent of older teenagers owning or using a wireless phone. Seventy-seven percent of teenagers who owned a handheld system were found to have used it in the last six months, compared to twenty-five percent of adult owners. As might be expected, adults preferred to play games on the PC rather than home console, with the situation reversed for teenagers, although fifty-eight percent of households with both a PC and console considered the console to be the dominant games platform. The report found that teenagers tend to be more social when playing, with sixty-four percent of adults playing console games alone and teens, particularly teenage girls, being five times more likely to play a multiplayer game on a console. Seventy-eight percent of male teens were found to play online, compared to fifty-eight percent of female teens. Interestingly, the majority of games players in the twenty-five to thirty-four year old age bracket (which accounted for twenty-nine percent of all female gamers) were found to be female, although the games played were predominately Web based casual titles.