They sit on a couch all day, sports is an alien concept to them, they rarely watch TV. These are just a few of the stereotypes about gamers. But are they any real? Not exactly. The time of the current World Cup was a perfect opportunity for us to check if gamers are athletes and sports fans. Or maybe they are e-sportspeople and e-sports fans? Let’s find out.
One of the most popular kinds of video games are sports games, and one of the most popular series among them is FIFA. Each year a new edition comes out, refreshing the team rosters and adding new game modes. Of course FIFA is not just the name of a game series – it’s also the name of the International Football Federation. But are gamers interested in real-life football (or soccer for all the USA readers)? We asked the users of G2A, the world’s biggest marketplace for digital goods, including video games, a series of questions related to just that.
Let’s start with the fact that gamers are both men and women – they most often play every day (62%) or a few times a week (31%). When it comes to preferred game genres, nearly half of gamers – 40% – play sports games, and almost two thirds of them enjoy football(soccer) games. The survey showed it to be the most popular sport in the e-world, leaving behind even racing games (47%) and fighting games (39%).
What’s interesting, the number of people interested in virtual football and in this sport in real life is relatively high in both cases (57% and 27% respectively), other sports seem to be interesting to our users only in the virtual sphere. 20.2% of the whole surveyed group responded that they are not interested in any sport.
Another interesting observation can be the fact that even though football(soccer) is the most popular sport among gamers, they don’t seem to be interested in the World Cup championship going on now – only around 40% of them report planning to watch the games.
These are only a few points of data from our survey, you can find more on the infographic below.
The research was conducted in November 2022 on a group of 1 700 people visiting G2A.COM.
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