Recently, Nikkei Net, a humongous Japanese business news website, did a survey of over 1300 Nintendo DS owners. Nintendo published the results of the survey in nifty little pamphlets that have been distributed in electronics stores throughout Japan. I picked up one of the pamphlets the other day, and was immediately intrigued by the gender-based breakdowns in the survey results.
One question in the survey was "Please list all of the DS software that you own." In the survey results pamphlet, Nintendo presented the top 15 most-owned software as broken down by gender. Among 666 male respondents and 703 female respondents, here were the most-owned games by gender:
( Behind the cut. )
The gaming gender gap: Not as big - or as real - as the marketers would have you believe!
Or at least not in Japan, anyway.
PS - The back half of the DS survey results booklet has a section with blurby advertising for all of the top "best" DS games, as chosen by survey respondents. These are: Nintendogs, New Super Mario Brothers, Animal Crossing, Nou wo Kitaeru, Yawaraka Atama Juku, Joushikiryoku Ken Training, Eigo Zuke, Cooking Navi, a traditional calligraphy training game, Mario Cart DS, and Pokemon Diamond/Pearl. ALL of those games are developed and then advertised in highly gender-neutral terms - yes, even Cooking Navi (basically an interactive cookbook for your DS), despite the fact that cooking is still an extremely gendered activity in Japan. Cooking Navi, however, is all clean, crisp green and brown colors, and elegant photographs of food. No weird pink girly stuff like you'd get with Cooking Mama.
Games and software that don't target a certain gender ghetto sell better than those that do! Well whaddya know.
One question in the survey was "Please list all of the DS software that you own." In the survey results pamphlet, Nintendo presented the top 15 most-owned software as broken down by gender. Among 666 male respondents and 703 female respondents, here were the most-owned games by gender:
( Behind the cut. )
The gaming gender gap: Not as big - or as real - as the marketers would have you believe!
Or at least not in Japan, anyway.
PS - The back half of the DS survey results booklet has a section with blurby advertising for all of the top "best" DS games, as chosen by survey respondents. These are: Nintendogs, New Super Mario Brothers, Animal Crossing, Nou wo Kitaeru, Yawaraka Atama Juku, Joushikiryoku Ken Training, Eigo Zuke, Cooking Navi, a traditional calligraphy training game, Mario Cart DS, and Pokemon Diamond/Pearl. ALL of those games are developed and then advertised in highly gender-neutral terms - yes, even Cooking Navi (basically an interactive cookbook for your DS), despite the fact that cooking is still an extremely gendered activity in Japan. Cooking Navi, however, is all clean, crisp green and brown colors, and elegant photographs of food. No weird pink girly stuff like you'd get with Cooking Mama.
Games and software that don't target a certain gender ghetto sell better than those that do! Well whaddya know.
