Alex St. John talks to Mercury News about Nintendo’s success with casual gamers:

MN: On casual games, Nintendo is really starting to expand the market because of the Wii controller. Has anybody measured what the impact is on casual sites, and whether they are bigger than the console audiences?

ASJ: The thing that is interesting to observe is that, here are some of my favorite statistics: what you consider a core gamer, the young male gamer, is the largest demographic of gamers, but they’re only 10 percent. Ninety percent of gamers are not young males. So it is broad based. On the PC on the Internet, gaming is the No. 1 use of the computer after email and chat. It’s highly dominant. On the PC and the Internet, the age demographic is older and skews more female. The audience is about 145 million people in the U.S. report that they play some kind of game or other.

MN: The nongamers that Nintendo is going after already playing games on the web?

ASJ: They are already playing games on the web. The Internet got Mom. People who never played games before found them on the web and started playing them. Now they are gamers and they even buy games. Now the console guys are saying hey, maybe we can get some of those guys playing PC games. Let’s offer light content and see if we can lure them over. My suspicion is that the consoles will always be great at entertaining young males and females to some extent. The PC will be the dominant place for playing the lighter puzzle and strategy type play. So I doubt there will be a huge amount of success. But we are seeing a large expansion of the market.

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Source: Mercury News