Here’s the report. Note that the report only measures visits to websites so people playing games with a desktop client like WoW aren’t counted in it unless they visited the website (which I’d imagine a decent percentage of users do, but certainly not all).
Edit: Steven Davis dissects the numbers and comes up rightfully skeptical.
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July 10th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Adrian Crook
Hmm. The #s seems flawed. 217M is the gross total of unique visitors to the top 10 gaming websites (like Yahoo Games, MSN Games, etc). So it doesn’t account for:
1) The difference between visitors and players
2) Any overlap in uniques between sites (i.e. 1 person who plays on two or more sites)
And as you mentioned, it doesn’t capture anyone launching a game via client s/w, which is pretty much the entire retail PC game sector.
But I’m sure we’ll see “217M online gamers!” popping up in some powerpoints henceforth.
July 10th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Matt
Yep, those flaws are all correct I’d say Adrian.
On the other hand, the entire retail PC game sector that isn’t reflected there (e.g. a good portion, though an unknown portion, of WoW’s users are reflected there) is pretty insignificant. I can’t imagine they’d add more than 10 million to that figure and I think that’s probably being quite generous.