Who plays casual games on desktop in Singapore these days?

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Earlier, I had a look into the Southeast Asian casual games market, and in this study I am focusing particularly on Singapore. The data in this study come from actual Singaporean user gameplays and games that are available at Gametop.com. It should be noted that the games in question are downloadables for Windows PC platform.

Casual games in this context refer to games that are typically from indie game development studios, and not the “big titles” like Skyrim or World of Warcraft. The data set is one year’s worth of casual gaming, and in some instances limited to 90 days due to privacy restrictions.

Male domination

In many parts of the world, the number of women who play is the same as men. In Singapore, however, the situation is very much dominated by males. The data shows that roughly 75 to 85 percent of the users in the downloadable casual gaming market are men in Singapore. These percentages are huge when compared to the gamer gender distribution of neighboring countries or to the average around the world (around 50 percent/ 50 percent).

On a quick look, some close relatives in terms of gamer gender distribution would be United Arab Emirates (90 percent/ 10 percent) and Saudi Arabia (95 percent/ 5 percent). This gender disparity has been increasing over the years.

When extending the date ranges, it seems that the ratio was more balanced in previous years. There is no single explanation for this, but one could argue that females have moved to mobile gaming faster than men. Another factor could be that male gamers are likely more hard core when it comes to the number of game plays.

Preferred operating system

The games offered on Gametop.com are primarily for Windows PC users, so it is more interesting to look at the system versions, than the operating systems themselves. Windows 7 is the clear winner with more than a 70 percent share of all game plays.

Interestingly the newly launched Windows 10 is nowhere to be seen. You could imagine that users with Windows 10 computers have systems capable of running the newest games, and thus they might not be that interested in more simple casual games.

Another hypothesis would be that Windows 10 market penetration in general is still relatively low in Singapore. It is interesting to note that Windows XP still has a very stable 10 percent share of the total, despite the operating system being more than 14 years old already. This makes sense as most of the casual games run fine on older computers.

What games are being played?

At Gametop, there are more than 400 game titles covering most of the popular genres. Age and gender play a big role as to what kind of games people want to play. Singaporean gaming marketing seems to be dominated by males, and this can be seen in the game category data.

The most popular game category is action, and women are not playing these games at all. This might sound stereotypical, but women in Singapore seem to be more interested in the hidden object games and different simulation games. But given the fact that the female gamers make up only 5 to 15 percent of the total, the popular genres data might be misleading because of the low volumes.

The second most popular category is racing games. Action and racing games are the most popular genres almost anywhere in the world, but there are some interesting insights when you dive deeper into the data. It is common knowledge that the Singaporean population is aging rapidly, and perhaps we can see some of that in the gaming data as well.

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