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Features
2017/05

Only 13% Of Hardcore Gamers Plan On Buying An Xbox Scorpio

New survey stats have been published by Nielsen Media in their U.S. Games 360 Report, covering a wide range of gaming topics within the electronic entertainment industry, including what game systems consumers – casual, hardcore and non-gamers alike – were planning on buying this year and how aware they were of those systems even existing.

A sample size of 2,000 participants over the age of 13, with a 50/50 split between males and females. They start off with the basics, noting that 65% of Americans are gamers over the age of 13. This includes hardcore games, browser games, Facebook games, casual games, and mobile games. This is up by 6% from 2012, where only 58% of Americans were gamers.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of gamers prefer playing on home consoles compared to mobile devices and tablets. 47% said they preferred traditional home consoles, such as the Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo’s systems. 27% said they preferred gaming on PC, and 26% said they preferred gaming on mobile. With those stats it would seem like the Nintendo Switch would be able to catch the preference of both groups, eh?

But the real meat and potatoes comes in the form of intent to purchase. Only 13% of hardcore gamers have intent to purchase an Xbox Scorpio this fall. The PS4 Pro didn’t fare much better, with only 15% of the hardcore gaming audience planning to go all in on the system.

Unsurprisingly enough, casual gamers were even lower yet, with only 9% planning on getting an Xbox Scorpio and only 11% gunning for the PS4 Pro.

This ties into the other figures showing that only 11% of casuals in the survey have heard of the Xbox Scorpio, and 21% have heard of the PS4 Pro. Those are actually decent figures for the PS4 Pro given how little it’s been advertised and how it hasn’t done much to distinguish itself from the vanilla PS4.

Core gamers, however, had slightly higher stats, with 27% having heard of the PS4 Pro, but only 14% having been informed of the Xbox Scorpio.

For non-gamers the stats were even worse, with only 9% having heard of the PS4 Pro and only 3% being aware of the Scorpio.

So how well does this bode for the potential sales of the Scorpio and the continued sales of the PS4 Pro?

Well, a lot of it will depend on the mind-share in the gaming community leading up to the fall release for the Scorpio, and the fall software line-up for the PS4 Pro.

Keep in mind that only 7% of non-gamers have any awareness at all about the Nintendo Switch, while 22% of casuals are aware of the Switch, and 29% of core gamers are aware of the Switch, all of whom are over 13 years of age. So basically the Switch stats aren’t too far off from Scorpio stats in the survey, but as we all know, the Nintendo Switch is Nintendo’s fastest selling console in the history of the company, and it’s breaking records while having launched in the off-season in March.

So Microsoft shouldn’t need to worry too much about the stats so long as they have a good line-up of games set to debut during E3 and they can capture a positive piece of mind-share coming out of the big event next month.

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