Like many twenty-somethings, once I realized the pandemic and related lockdowns would last much longer than the originally promised two weeks, I dusted off my old PlayStation 4 and settled in for the summer.
It was a blast to rediscover the games I’d enjoyed so much in high school and college. However, one thing quickly stood out: graphics that seemed nothing short of revolutionary at the time now appeared lackluster. Even the cutting-edge new titles I bought didn’t have the same “wow” factor that a game like Far Cry 4 did back in 2014. After going down a YouTube rabbit hole of 4k giga-ultra-super PC graphics demos, the idea of building a gaming computer – completely off the radar before five-odd months of isolation – had firmly taken root.
But what sort of community would I be joining? Are PC gamers substantially different from those who exclusively use consoles? As it happens, comparing two distinct groups is an area where audience intelligence platforms really shine, so I decided to dig into People Pattern’s Portrait Database and find out.
Use Case: Comparing Two Audiences
The Portrait Database (PDb) is a repository of every social profile the platform has ever ingested. It currently contains over 530 million portraits (that is, individuals and organizations with one or more social media profiles) and over a trillion data points. With so many portraits already in the platform, it’s easy to skip the several-hour process of importing a new audience. Instead, I used the PDb to instantly find people who identified themselves as either PC or console gamers, then compared the results. Would the significantly higher cost of entry for computer gaming lead to more older players, or would technical modifications often employed by PC gamers appeal more to younger digital natives? Which audience would contain more women, a demographic traditionally underrepresented in video game audiences?
PC Gamers
To begin, I set the PDb as my input source and specified that I wanted to find people, as opposed to organizations or entertainment accounts, who used certain keywords in their social bios.
PC gaming: definitely not a cult.
The platform returned about 23,100 people already in the PDb that matched these criteria. PC gamers are overwhelmingly male. They tend to be in their twenties and white, although there are a fair number of older players in the audience.
Next, I looked at their primary interests. These are the topics a portrait talks about most frequently, which the platform determines by looking at a large collection of their recent posts.
Unsurprisingly, the most prevalent primary interest is gaming, with nearly half of the audience mentioning it frequently. Next is humor, followed by school life, which tracks with the large college-aged segment.
Console Gamers
Console gaming, the much cheaper and more popular alternative to computers, is dominated mostly by three companies: Microsoft, who makes the Xbox; Sony, who makes the Playstation; and Nintendo, which makes the Switch.
While the PC gamers query returned only around 23,000 matches, the console query above returned nearly 700,000. It makes sense – a lower barrier to entry means consoles have a wider appeal and attract both casual players and more serious hobbyists. Console gamers are also a more diverse group, both in terms ethnic makeup and female audience share.
While “gaming” is still the largest primary interest expressed by the console audience, it’s 11% less prevalent than in the PC group, validating our “higher concentration of casual users” theory. Apart from that, top expressed interests remain mostly similar.
Audience intelligence platforms like People Pattern provide fast and reliable solution for market research. High-level comparisons like this allow marketers to quickly isolate points of similarity or difference between two groups, which they can then dig into with influencer analysis, brand analysis, and a wide variety of other tools designed to extract actionable insights from audience data.
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