Casual Gaming Still Beats YouTube, MySpace

Parks Associates has a study confirming that casual games are still the preferred online activity of adult users. Of those adults participating in the study 34 percent play games weekly while 29 percent use sites like YouTube and 19 percent use social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.

However when it comes to growth video streaming site use was up 123 percent this year while casual online game playing rose 79 percent and social networking is up 46 percent.

Parks analyst James Kuai warns that the casual gaming industry “cannot rest on its laurels. In order to counter the growing competition from other online activities, the industry needs to continue to grow its fan base and find ways to better monetize its existing audience.”

Parks does admit that online gaming does have certain advantages over social networking and video streaming sites when it comes to methods of raising revenue such as web-based and in-game advertising, free trials, subscriptions, and micro-transactions.

I tend to wonder who participated in this study and whether all PC games were lumped together under the casual heading. Also adult is actually rather ambiguous. There is so much difference in the preference of different age groups even when separated by just a decade. How valid can this study really be? 

via Gamasutra