Other Research on European and French Gamers

Generally speaking, studies related to video games and/or gamers are conducted either on a regional or on a national basis. Data at a global level is rarely gathered and only concerns the games industry and the revenues it generates, not gamers in particular. It is thus hard to find data grouping together speakers of the same language if they are not geographically connected.

As the main target of our study is francophone gamers, implicitly from France, this review will focus on studies dealing with European and French populations.

In recent years, many studies were conducted at both French and European levels by various organisations. The table below presents the statistical data that appear in five studies covering the 2012-2016 period. Two of them deal with European data (blue columns) whereas the other three concern France exclusively (orange columns).

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13 Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée.

14 The data reported in this survey and in that of the SELL concerns the year 2016.

15 This information was gathered after sending an email inquiry to the people who conducted the survey.

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16 Please note that contrary to our research, none of the abovementioned studies included a third category for gender.

17While comparing data about France with data from the other 15 countries surveyed in the European consumer study, it appears that France is the 3^rd country with most female involvement in video games on the whole, behind Sweden (57%) and Finland (54%), the two countries with the biggest proportions of players.

18 For the European and French studies 2012, the overall percentage of people playing video games in each age class has been obtained by calculating the mean between the participation of men and that of women in each age class. Decimal numbers have been rounded up to the higher unit.

19 Although the proportion of 45-64 playing video games is smaller than that of 25-34, the older category reported spending more time playing video games than the younger (7.5 hours per week against 6.2).

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Table 6. Comparison between statistical data gathered by five studies about European or French gamers

20 According to the study, “[t]he PC Gaming market achieved an [sic] historic comeback in 2016 and now exceeds one billion euros” (p. 35), with a growth of 30% in sales.

21 As explained when analysing the results of the study in section 5.3.2, these statistics correspond to the number of people who played this specific genre in a multiple-choice question, meaning that each respondent can contribute to increasing the percentage of several or even all game genres provided they sometimes play it.

22 The top 10 game genres were established in this study by looking at the game sales in volume in 2016 in the physical market, i.e. games sold for actual cash and delivered immediately. Action/adventure came in first place, by far, with almost 5 million sales, whereas the other two generated respectively around 3.2 and 3 million sales.

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The findings of all five studies emphasise the fact that, nowadays, the profile of “the gamer” has evolved tremendously, giving birth to a polymorphous target audience that is as diverse as the games on the market. Gamers indeed vary in terms of gender, age, frequency of gaming and platforms they use to play, among others.

Apart from the extensive statistical data gathered on gamers’ profiles in terms of gender and age repartition, these studies have also analysed other important aspects that have a more qualitative relevance, such as perceptions about gaming and the influence playing video games may have on people, especially children. Some of them, namely those issued by the ISFE, payed special attention to children’s gaming practises, adult supervision and consumers’ attention to PEGI ratings, which makes sense because the ISFE is the very body that created the PEGI rating system in the first place, in 2003. Some studies also delved into gamers’ habits (ISFE, 2012 and CNC, 2013), even comparing them with non-gamers’ (CNC, 2013). The extensive inquiry into gamers’ consuming practises led by the French CNC in 2013 also explored topics such as audiovisual equipment owned by gamers, duration of gaming sessions, reasons for playing and persons with whom players did so. The CNC concluded that gaming was generally a regular activity, practiced mainly indoors and on one’s own. These questions give researchers as well as the industry a good insight into gamers’ lifestyles, tastes and needs. Such research may also provide valuable feedback in terms of localisation.

Still, as O’Hagan pointed out, localisation practices are mostly industry-oriented rather than based on research (2009a, p. 213). Even so, some research is led by the industry itself and not by scholars. This is a crucial point which may explain why some areas, for example which platforms gamers use, were covered in detail whereas the language in which gamers play was always left out of the analysis. Yet, this piece of information is a central element in publishers’

marketing strategies as well as in the feel of the game, it should thus be a key component of their analysis. The void of information regarding such linguistic practises is something we will try to bridge, or at least to address, in our study, since it is central to our approach.

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