Gaming statistician’s get ready! According to comScore (a Market researcher) the United States audience for gaming website visitors has grown an impressive 86 million people, with 67 million people just a year ago. The time spent playing games has increased 42% with the amount of time internet users spend playing video games jumped from 3.7% to 4.9% from December 2007 to December 2008.
Below are the Top 8 Gaming websites with their visitors count:
1) Yahoo – 19.5 million
2) EA Online – 15.4 million
3) Disney Games – 13.4 million
4) Wild Tangent – 13.3 million
5) Addictinggames.com – 11.3 million
6) AOL Games – 10.7 million
7) MSN Games – 103. million
8) Miniclip – 7 million
The director of comScore – Edward Hunter, said that the ad-supported games is one of the few things people have really been doing more of since the decline of our economy. It has even effected gaming sells, where casual gamers are now playing the free-to-play games rather than purchasing them. It was such a noticable change that the NPD Group stated that it was a clear explanation why the sales dropped nearly 14% for retail sales for video games. However, that hasn’t stopped the video game industry from growing as it grew 19% from its previous year to $22 billion in 2008.