Web Survey on Gaming Platform Use Shows PC Most Popular

An informal survey on the Weibo “Video Game Bar” page asked users what kind of gamer they are.

What kind of gamer are you? PC single player? Web gamer? Cell phone gamer? Or 3DS or PSV player? WiiU or Xbox360? PS3? Could it be that you have all the consoles? Play everything?

Come come come, take a little survey to see what kind of gamer most of the Video Game Bar friends are!

I scrolled through the 238 replies and tallied up the different responses. With regard to what platform people used, the majority was PC. Some people only listed games, like League of Legends or World of Warcraft, without listing platform. In those cases, I tallied the platform the game is on (LOL and WOW would go to PC).

I also tallied up some of the games that were mentioned. I didn’t include them all, because some were only mentioned once. Therefore, the following only includes games that were mentioned more than once.


Mobile gaming is likely, in reality, the most popular gaming platform in China due to the fact that nearly everybody has a phone and it’s relatively inexpensive. However, mobile gamers might not consider themselves “gamers”, in the way that US Angry Birds players won’t take their status as “gamers” seriously enough to join a Facebook group for gamers, or browse gamer forums. I can say anecdotally that, on public transportation, the number of people playing video games on their cell phones far exceeds the number playing on a handheld console.

Data from the US on the last generation of platforms (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360; 3DS and Vita) shows the following comparison:

Of course, we can’t forget that numbers are heavily skewed in China due to the fact that consoles are illegal to sell. So whereas all my North American data is based on sales, no such figures are available from China and it is only possible to rely on what people admit to owning. It’s therefore not strange to see that over half the population plays games either on PC or on their mobile phones, and that the majority of the games they play are PC games.

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