Around 40% of the People on the Planet Now Play Video Games

The stats are in: An incredible 3.1 billion people on the planet are active gamers.

In a study by research and consultancy agency DFC Intelligence, around 40 percent of people on the planet admit to gaming on the regular. Finally, after ages of gaming being looked at as an antisocial hobby of moody teenagers and lonely basement-dwellers, the numbers prove that there’s more to them than what people may think.

Only 8 percent of the monstrosity that is 3.1 billion people are dedicated console gamers—proving that our perception of gamers being associated solely with consoles has never been more wrong. This is the group that spends the most on gaming, though. But given how insanely pricey games for consoles are, it is not entirely shocking. After all, the gaming world is a multi-billion dollar annual industry, with the likes of a new Call of Duty release selling in the tens of millions.

Additionally, almost half of them—about 1.5 billion people, that is—said they prefer to use PCs over consoles. And, unsurprisingly, the fastest-growing and the largest segment of these gamers are ones who only play on their mobile phones. According to the data, these gamers account for almost half of all video game consumers. With games like PUBG catering to an exclusively mobile phone player market in several countries, the data adds up.

A staggering 1.42 billion of these gamers are located in Asian countries, which amounts to almost half the planet’s gaming community. The continent that comes second is Europe with a large gap—only 668 million paying game consumers.

And while the figures do look shocking at a first glance, it is time we admit most of us game—or have gamed at some point in our lives, be it the addictive Brick Breaker game in the OG BlackBerry, or our obsession with Angry Birds back in the day, or even the games we stored in our phones for our younger cousins.

And now, the pandemic has made gaming a socialising—and addictive—practice. The global video game industry is thriving as gaming offers an engaging distraction for people in isolation. Moreover, with real life sporting events being cancelled, people are also turning to e-sports to get that rush. And if the hours we spend playing Online Ludo or Animal Crossing are anything to go by, gamers will rise to rule the planet.

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