[MUSAI] 2020 White Paper on Korean Games ②, a Summary of the Characteristics of the Korean Console Game Users

2021-01-22
We have selected useful information from the ‘2020 White Paper on Korean Games’ and introduced it to you last time, and we will continue to report more with this article. Today, we will investigate the characteristics of the domestic console game users along with the status of overall game usage in Korea.
▶ Game Utilization Rate to be 70.5% in 2020
The Korea Creative Content Agency has conducted a survey on the general public between age 10 to 65 on game usage, and 70.5% played games out of total 3,084 citizens. Among them, the mobile game received the highest usage rate (91.1%), followed by PC (59.1%), console (20.8%), and arcade games (10%).
Looking at the characteristics of respondents, women’s usage rate was relatively high in ‘mobile games,’ and men’s in ‘PC games.’ By ages, 40s in ‘mobile games,’ 20’s in ‘PC games,’ and 30’s in ‘console games’ recorded relatively high usage rates.

▶ Characteristics of Console Game Users 1 – Gender, Age, and Time Spent
As mentioned earlier, the usage rate of console games among 2,174 game users was 20.8%. Like PC games, the utilization rate for men (22.3%) was higher than that of women (19%), and users in their 30s responded significantly higher usage rate than that of other age groups.
Moreover, 38% of the respondents said they play console games ‘1 to 4 days per month,’ with an average usage time of 60.8 minutes per day on the weekdays and 110.8 minutes per day on the weekends. The value was slightly higher compared to the survey result conducted in 2019.

▶ Characteristics of Console Game Users 2 – Device Used and Genres
On the survey, the most popular device among domestic game users was the Nintendo Switch, which recorded a 41% response rate. In 2020, due to the explosive increase in the number of users of the ‘Nintendo Switch,’ the ‘PS4,’ the champion of the previous year which recorded only 37.8% of usage rate, gave up its position.
The interesting fact is that the Xbox 360, the older model, has more users than the newer Xbox One, and that the user numbers of those two models combined, it is similar to the number of Nintendo Wii users. This shows only a small number of gamers use Xbox in Korea. However, since Xbox is trying to expand its user pool via various promotions with its Xbox Series X, it may be possible to recover the number of users in 2021.
The most popular game genres among console gamers were the following 1. RPG, 2. Sports, and 3. Simulation RPG. By age, Simulation RPG was first in 20s, RPG in 20s and 30s, and Sports in 40s and 50s.


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