Shooter lovers just like to bust things up.

MARCH 29, 2009 • This month DFC Intelligence released two comprehensive surveys of high-end PC gamers. The surveys were conducted in February 2009 using the panel of over 1.2 million GameShadow users. One survey was conducted of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) users and another survey was conducted of First-Person Shooter (FPS) users. The exciting thing about these surveys was it provided valuable insight into not just demographics, but also the actual hardware systems and other software used by PC game consumers.

GameShadow provides a freeware utility that allows PC games to keep up-to-date on patches, game trailers, game demos and mods. The utility is able to track each users’ system hardware and the software installed on that PC. GameShadow also collects self-reported data on users, including location by country, age and gender. Surveying the High-End PC Gamer.

In the survey of GameShadow users it was found that 236,080 consumers had at least one FPS title installed. This compares with 52,800 unique users that had at least one MMOG title installed. Not surprisingly, the user base skewed heavily male, over 96% in the case of MMOGs and 97% for FPS titles. However, it was surprising to see such a diverse age range among users. Only 26% of FPS users were under the age of 25, while 25% were over 45. However, age range could vary signifi cantly by title. For example, the FPS Counter-Strike had 54% of users under the age of 25.

GameShadow is a utility that allows PC games to keep up-to-date on patches, game trailers, game demos and mods.

The survey also took a look at the top installed titles among users of various products. For example, 35% of City of Heroes users also had World of Warcraft installed. Furthermore, 27% had Guild Wars, another NCsoft title installed. However, even among MMOG users the favorite genre was first-person shooters. Among all MMOG users, FPS titles accounted for 18% of the total software installed, versus only 11% for MMOGs.

One exciting feature of this survey was that GameShadow is able to monitor the actual hardware installed on the end user’s PC so the survey was able to look at the CPU, graphics card, operating system and installed memory. It quickly becomes clear that users of FPS games are pushing the high-end. NVIDIA graphics chipsets were the favorite for FPS users and accounted for 64% of total graphics cards installed among FPS users.

The complete surveys contain complete Excel datasets with full breakdowns for the 12 most popular FPS titles and 12 most popular MMOG titles. In addition, there is aggregate data for each category as a whole. The survey results for each product are broken down by age, gender, country of location, genres installed, individual titles installed, CPU, graphics card, operating system and memory installed.