comScore has recently examined the online gaming boom in the U.S. and the firm found that the data "showed a significant increase in the size of its audience during the past year as consumers increasingly opt for cheaper entertainment alternatives, driven in part by the reality of economic challenges." According to comScore's date, online gaming in the U.S. as of May 2009 attracted 87 million visitors, representing a very healthy 22% increase over last year.
"Online gaming continues to be one of the top gaining categories over the past year growing at ten times the rate of the total U.S. Internet population and reaching nearly one out of every two Internet users," said Edward Hunter, comScore director of gaming solutions. "And the growth in the category is occurring not only at the top gaming destination sites, but also through viral distribution platforms, including widgets and applications. In fact, some online gaming companies that distributed their games across sites are reaching as many people as the top online gaming sites."
comScore said that Yahoo! Games leads the category with 19.4 million visitors (up six percent), followed by EA Online with 18 million visitors (up 34%), Nickelodeon Casual Games with 14.8 million visitors, and WildTangent Network with 13.8 million (up 16%). You can check out the complete list in the chart below.
Aside from traditional online gaming, distributed content such as widgets and applications, is also huge for the category, comScore points out. The firm said distributed content "can often reach audiences of a size comparable to online gaming destination sites." comScore cited MochiMedia, which reached a combined audience of 16.9 million in May, greater than all but two sites in the online gaming category. Games2Win also reached 1.8 million people, and Tetris Online reached 165,000 people.
"The power and reach of viral content distribution is well captured by comScore Extended Web Metrix," commented Alok Kejriwal, CEO and Co-Founder, Games2win. "With these latest consumer traffic numbers, we can now effectively present and strategically leverage our accelerating audience reach, and share data with our advertisers, marketers and partners that represents a holistic view of who is playing our games and from where."
1 Comments
7 months ago
First of all, your signup process claims to be fast but actually takes you to the home page when you are done instead of returning to this article. Not ideal.
Secondly, this data has some pretty big omissions. Just a single facebook game - Zynga's Texas HoldEm Poker - has 14 million unique visitors in a month, which is enough to put it at spot 5 in this list. But comscore doesn't seem to count these social games.
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/07/02/the-isg-top-25-facebook-games-for-july-2009/
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