At Home or On-The-Go: Which Gaming Style is The Most Popular?
According to mygaming.com, an online video gaming magazine, more than 1.8 billion people play video games across the world. Considering that the current global population is around 7 billion, that comes to approximately one in every four people who play at least one video game every month.
So, the big question is – how many people play at home and how many play on-the-go? Would the average game prefer to play the powerful empire in Final Fantasy XV at home or on-the-go?
Frankly speaking, this isn’t very easy to tell. The above report shows that gamers use a variety of devices. In fact, a majority play games on multiple devices. For instance, it isn’t uncommon to find a gamer playing Lord of the Rings on PC and later playing Pokémon on a gaming console. When it comes to quests and role-playing games, you’ll even find gamers switching between devices within the same game. For instance, a player can begin playing a game on PC and, while traveling, continue with the game on their smartphone.
This makes it difficult to say precisely which of the two is popular – playing at home or playing on-the-go – because as we can see, players sometimes don’t even have the choice.
Comparison based on home vs. on-the-go devices
Perhaps a different way to find out the more popular option is to look at the popularity of home-based compared to on-the-go devices.
Before we do that, however, we need to make a few assumptions;
- Gamers will only use home-based gaming devices when at home.
- When on the go, they will only use mobile devices
You need to understand that this reasoning is also flawed to some degree because sometimes people choose to play on mobile devices even when they are at home. For instance, if power goes out, a lot of people will turn to their mobile devices to continue playing – not by choice but by need.
Anyway, using our assumptions, it’s easy to see that at-home gaming is more popular compared to gaming on-the-go. According to the study mentioned above whose findings were released in mid-2016, a significant majority of gamers play on their PCs, with more than 62 percent of gamers admitting to playing most of their games on PC. That’s around 1.2 billion gamers.
The second most popular gaming device was also a home-based option – gaming consoles. In total, around 1.008 billion gamers, accounting for 56 percent of the total gaming population, played most of their games on the console.
The first mobile device – smartphones – comes at number three with about 630 million gamers saying they played most of their games on the smartphone in 2016. That’s roughly 35 percent of the total. Finally, at number four is the second most popular mobile gaming option – dedicated handheld consoles. Approximately 17 percent of gamers admit to playing a majority of their games on these devices.
In a nutshell, home-based gaming appears more popular. A lot more people seem to be playing their games at home on home-based gaming devices compared to on-the-go devices.