The report also looked into why people play video games, with 74 per cent of respondents saying games contributed to their emotional wellbeing, and 67 per cent saying they helped maintain social connections. Interestingly 42 per cent of people aged 65 years or older play games, with many in that age category saying that they played to keep their minds active. In total 91 per cent of Australian households have a device on which games have been played.
The average daily playtimes for male gamers was 89 minutes, the report found, while female gamers played for an average of 71 minutes per day. What was interesting about that, though, was that while men under 50 play more than women the same age, women between the ages of 60 and 75 play much more than men in that age group.
Digital Australia is a biennial report charting the consumption of video games in Australia.
While there’s always talk about parents being concerned about children playing, 89 per cent of parents surveyed said they were familiar with the parental controls on consoles, and 59 per cent play with children in the room. More than half of the research participants believed games promote creativity in school students, at 60 per cent. Another major concern for parents was lootboxes, with 41 per cent saying they were somewhat or very concerned about them.
Now that there’s less talk about virtual reality being the future, it wasn’t a surprise to see that only 21 per cent of households have a player who has used a virtual reality headset. However, the study didn’t specify whether that was a high-tech headset like the Oculus Rift or PlayStation VR, or simply a Google Cardboard headset. In comparison, 77 per cent of all households had someone who used augmented reality, which is a lot more accessible and a feature in games like Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.
Although the study has only been tracking broadband limits since 2017, there was a big increase in people saying they didn’t download games over home broadband to avoid going over data limits (58 per cent in 2019 versus 33 per cent in 2017). This was also the case with downloading over mobile data (70 per cent in 2019 versus 51 per cent in 2017).
Participants for the study were randomly selected from the Nielsen Your Voice Panel, representing 1210 Australian households and 3228 individuals of all ages in those households.
