Social Games Engender Diversity

Now that social games have evolved past simple farming games to a full-fledged multibillion dollar industry, does anyone still believe that the typical social gamer is a 43-year-old woman? While most of the initial games on Facebook appealed to this demographic, social game content has grown in both volume and variety. Sure, there are still a lot of clones out there - look at the sheer number of farming games - but new genres and game mechanics have emerged that pull in a much wider audience.

To demonstrate this, I took a look at three of the most popular games across the Viximo network, focusing on gender.

GAME 1 - Big Business. This graph is probably what we would typically associate with a social game. Females account for about 60% of the users, views, and revenue for the game across our network:

GAME 2 - Ravenwood Fair. This game, deployed on similar sites as Big Business, has a slightly different pattern. Males make up half of the audience, but are much less engaged and certainly don’t monetize as well as females:

GAME 3 - Backyard Monsters. On the other end of the spectrum, this game blows the whole “housewives are the only ones playing social games” theory completely out of the water.

As these data show, social games aren't just for women in their 30's (despite what your core gamer friends might have you believe). As with traditional games, social games can appeal to many different demographic groups by providing carefully tailored content and functionality. Each segment of users has different - and potentially advantageous - usage habits and spending patterns. This is where Viximo comes in.

As a social game distributor, we use a game’s demographic data (among other things) to inform our approach to advertising, cross-promotion, community messaging, sales and incentives, and more. Making a great game is a big part of success, but getting it into the hands of the right users is even more important.