We generally don’t think about the gender divide when it comes to mobile gaming; sure there are games targeted at females and quite a few targeted at males, but you wouldn’t think there is a huge difference in behaviours between the beings from Mars and Venus. However, according to a study by Flurry, there is, and it’s women that tend to spend more time and money on mobile games than men.
Flurry based its study on ‘successful’ games on 1.1 million devices and found that women make 31% more in-app purchases than men do, and also spend 35% more time in game than their male counterparts. The study also revealed that women tend to be more loyal to games (or at least, give it more of a chance), registering a 42% higher average than men in retaining games for 7 days. This is apparently true all over the world with no significant differences between females and males even when Flurry just looked at U.S. data.
Flurry went on to study exactly which games were influencing these figures as it would be easy to use Kim Kardashian’s stand-out game as a scapegoat. As the above graph shows, many of the categories are actually dominated by women - as evidenced by the pink - whereas men predictably tend to dominate the more violent, ‘masculine’ genres like sports and tower defense. While this shouldn’t be taken completely on Flurry’s word – they only used data from games on the Flurry Network – it’s still very interesting insight into the mobile gaming industry from a gender-specific perspective.
What do you think about Flurry’s findings about the fact females spend more money, time and are more loyal to mobile games then males? Let us know your thoughts.
Source: Flurry via Gameindustry
