Breakdown of Gamers - US, UK, DE, FR

I posted this over on the Hero/Villain Culture board but I'm hoping to get a better response here.

Saw this chart over at Blue's News today.

My main questions over here are where are all the MMO women from the UK, Germany and France? Comparing MMO players to PC players UK and Germany have only 1 in 5 PC playing women also playing MMOs, France about 1 in 4. In the US, like male PC players it's 1 in 2. Is this a cultural thing? Are hardware requirements too high relative to disposable income in those European countries?

Maybe we're just more nerdy?

Like I said in the cross-post, it doesn't match my experiences, which are just as skewed as that statistic.

I don't know about the stats but in this house we are 1:1. I got my wife playing CoH/V 18 months ago. She has two 50s (a DB/WP Scrapper on Defiant and a Ice/NRG Blaster on Union) and is now working a Earth/Rad troller and a corruptor on Defiant. We mainly just work as a Duo.

I think that there might be less EU woman playing this game compared to US servers (even though that is not my experience) because the American Comics are less popular here then on the other side of the pond. We got a thriving 'comic' industry here but at least for the continentals that consist more of the Belgian, French and for me Dutch comic artists.

The concept Superhero is considered to be one for nerdy little boys with big glasses and pimples. Not very attractive to woman.

oo female + for game portals.

and who said they didnt exist.

I was more curious about the overall lack of European women playing MMOs in general than this game in particular. Lack of need for escapism and reinvention that a virtual avatar can provide or are they just more "grounded" in real life?

(Assuming these statistics are correct for the sake of discussion)

Disposable income can't be the issue in France.

I'd wager it's more of a cultural thing.

First, the localization. Women tend to be more casual in their gaming than men, and MMOs coming with poor translations and support, if at all, can be a turn-off. You hardly see anything in english in France, even video games tend to have top notch translations. From what I've seen, many MMOs aren't up to these standards.

Add to that the slang french MMO players use is kind of elitist, mixing english and french words in a way that makes hardly any sense for a new player. This is much worse than the DPS, AoE, LFT acronyms we use on english-speaking servers, because most of that slang is grammatically incorrect in both english and french. For example, people will sometimes call a healer a "heal", which doesn't make any sense in either language (the french word would be "guérisseur" or "soigneur").

Culturally, France is also way behind the US concerning video games, as far as I know. It's still considered a nerdy hobby ; we've only started to see ads for console video games in the last two, three years.

Of course, this is all speculation on my end.

I'd like to see more women!

although, the fact that I've been confused for a girl IRL because my female toon's silicon slider wasn't maxed out isn't a great sign of the culture surrounding the game.

Regarding the statistics, it's important to remember that 78.63% of all statistics are made up on the spot (like that one was) and the 98.3% of statistics reported on the Internet are complete tripe (which is far closer to being true).

This has been a post by the Internation Society for the Understanding of Statistical Mathematics.

My wife doesn't play due to my hogging the PC most of the evening. Now I have a new laptop, I'll be hogging both (It doesn't really have the graphics capability to play MMORPG's tbh)

Or maybe women in europe just have access to a computer with internet more often?
As that says its the % of those above 8 that do have access to the internet, not of total population...

But yes, maybe especially young girls are still not as readily put in front of a computer and taught how to play with it in the olde world. (*recalls a topic here with people bragging how good their 5-year-old daughters are CoX ... *)
O: )

give us Pony as a travel power...they will come.