Quake player and t-shirt wearer Alice found some interesting stats on gaming in the UK.
* The UK has a population of 60 million people in 25 million households
*The UK’s installed base of consoles and handhelds: approx 20 million (80%)
*The UK’s installed base of game-capable PCs: approx 11 million (44%)
*The UK’s software market (PC, console, handheld) value: $1.8 billion.
*The UK has 9.5 million youths aged 7-19, of whom 8.3 million are gamers: that’s 87%, and here’s the great bit: 3.6 million gamers are female, so 42% female!
Maybe I’m out of touch with the 7 to 19-year-old crowd, but I find that last number hard to believe. It’s very rare that I see a female shopping for computer or console games, and the market’s most popular genres (shooters and sports games) tend to have a macho appeal. I’d imagine that the percentage of female gamers is growing, but I’d guess it might be at 20% or 25%, not 42%.
I went looking for corroborating or disputing stats. I found these stats on Game Girl Advance, but they get seriously debunked in the comments. These stats’ source (scroll down a bit) seems equally dubious, but seem more accurate. This seems like a reliable study, but it’s unclear how old it is. It does state that boys play games twice as much as girls, in terms of hours per work.
It’s only tangentially related, but I found an interesting article on gender-bending in computer games.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
During my MBA, I had to do a case study on the launch of Game Boy Colour. In doing extensive research, I discovered that one of the best markets for Game Boy was among girls. GBC lets you use old games. So a lot of girls got GBCs and used their brothers’ games. They could network the games and play together, which worked well for social interaction. Pokemon was the big GBC launch game and it already had a huge following among girls. With movies, TV shows, pogs and cards, Pokemon was perfect for inventing your own stories and it had positive female role models. You could also buy fashion accessories for GBC, such as cases or snap-on colour cases. Many of the newer GBC games were sold through non-traditional markets, such as alongside Pokemon wares. As a hand-held game, GBC was also mobile, so you could go to your friend’s house, the park, school, etc. It supported girl culture.
Don’t forget that “games” includes things like Minesweeper, Solitaire, PopCap Games, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Sim City, etc., all of which are more gender-neutral games. People assume that “gaming” means first-person shooters or sports game, but there are probably ten non-action games for every one action game.
One other thing to remember is that a lot of girls don’t buy the games — their boyfriends, brothers, male-associate-of-some-type do. But they still play ’em.
As I recall, there’s also some sort of spike in the 40-year-old female demographic. It’s moms buying games for their kids.
Consider, if you will, a majority of women purchase socks and underwear for men. By looking over statistics one might think that there wasn’t a market for cologne, underwear, socks or toileteries for men. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
The 43% comes from a survey done this year by TCI in the UK, and relates to teenagers (9-19) who play on consoles, at home. I got given it at work, so I believe it’s a paid-for report, otherwise I’d post a link.
The women-on-web-games count is true – MSN have 30 million registered players, some 70% of whom are women (from memory). Yahoo’s game portal demographic is 65% female, skewing age 25-45.
Hope that helps!
A.