世論 What Japan Thinks

I haven’t looked at video games for a while, so I was glad to find this survey from goo Research on video game usage by children. Video games cover handhelds, TV-connected games and even PC-based gaming.

Demographics

Between the 25th of June and 13th of July 2007 1,165 elementary school children (or people claiming to be children) responded to a public questionnaire available on the Kids goo web site. The sample was 60.0% girls, 3.4% in first year of elementary school (ages six or seven), 5.0% in second year, 9.9% in third year, 20.3% in forth year, 26.9% in fifth year, and 34.6% in sixth year (ages eleven or twelve). Note that since this is a public internet-based survey there will definite sampling bias.

There’s so much great data in this survey! Q4SQ is perhaps my favourite; based on my casual observations, not surprisingly the DS totally dominates everything else. However, the other new portable, the PSP, is played less than the ancient Famicon and Super Famicon. I’m surprised that these two machines did so well; is this due to parents being cheap, to them having less worries about graphic violence in the older titles, not wanting to spoil the kids on photo-realism, or do kids really choose themselves to play these machines?

Note that this survey was conducted before the new PSP Slim sold quarter of a million units in one week.
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infoPLANT conducted a survey regarding mobile phone game usage in Japan amongst 8,984 users of the DoCoMo iMode sevice, by offering the survey through the iMode menuing system. The questionnaire was available for a week in mid-November, and of the 8,984 respondents, 63.5% were female.

infoPLANT’s survey methods obviously indicate that they will most likely result in an over-representation of the heavy user demographic, but regardless this still presents an interesting snapshot on how some people use their mobile phones. One could argue that since a previous survey showed the majority of people were on unlimited usage plans (although the methodology of that survey was probably flawed), these consumers could more easily budget for pay games, and download them without worrying about additional transmission costs over and above the basic fee. Also note that almost all mobile phones come with built-in games, not just Tetris clones and the like, but pretty good quality commercial-grade RPGs and pet simulators. As for my own phone, I have a nice golf game, but I beat that and quit, and the shoot-em-up is no fun. I once downloaded a trial version of a pay-for game, but it took a long, long time and the game play was rather lacking, so basically I haven’t played any games at all this year.
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