Highlighting Global Demographics and Play
How do demographic factors align with mobile play behaviors globally?
As explored in Project 1, there are a number of patterns in mobile play behaviors among players globally. In Project 5, however, we start to dig into how demographic factors impact this picture for the United States. For this project, we look at how global demographic factors influence or are related to play behaviors on the global scale when it comes to mobile play. Because this project uses the same data as Project 1, it should be noted that this is based on player data from October 2020-October 2021, but has also added data on global demographics from the World Bank.
Internet, Income, and Education
Three major impacts for global engagement with mobile play – from how many heavy players are in a location to the duration of playtime – are percentage of people with access to the internet, the average percentage of people with Bachelor’s degrees, and the average income for a place. These, for the most part, align with the demographic factors that are important in the US, but income becomes more important on a global scale.
At the same time, some of the locales with lower average incomes and a lower percentage of average BA attainment have higher rates of daily play in comparison to countries or territories with higher average incomes and percentage of the population of BA degrees. While some of this could be explained by external factors, like the presence of military bases, the gap is large enough that this cannot account for or explain all of the difference.
Below is a map marking the relationship between average income (noted by intensity of color) and average daily play (noted by size of the circle on the map). Hover over a point or zoom in on an area for more information.
So What Does This Mean?
In comparison to demographic factors in the US – which are tracked by the US Census and account for most of the United States population – it is harder to find full sets of demographic factors for every place included in this study. Using data from the World Bank, we can see that there are some demographic elements related to economic standing and access which, unsurprisingly, tie with boosts in play behaviors. At the same time, however, there are surprising trends indicating that economic access is not the only explanatory factor for play. These trends should be further investigated to better address and tap into these markets, especially with economic factors in mind.
