Portable Gaming Habits Revealed

[wraggster]

Portable devices were designed to be taken anywhere, but users' top location to use these devices is at home, according to new research by NPD Group.

The firm told Edge, "79 percent [of those polled say] they use their portable device in-home, far more than any other location."

A statement from NPD added, "[This] indicates that these devices may be competing with more stationary entertainment devices for a user’s time."

Overall, the research found that people are using devices such as the smartphone, iPhone, iPod, DS and PSP more today than they were just three months ago.

Media, texting and business applications are all fine uses for portables, but what about gaming and gaming-centric devices like DS and PSP? NPD Group shared with us specific stats from the full report:

PSP

„"Gameplay is the feature used by most (84 percent) on the PlayStation Portable. Slightly more than one third of PSP owners are watching movies (35 percent) and listening to music (33 percent) on their device. The use of these cross category features is changing the scope of this gaming device to an entertainment device."

„"Twenty five percent are listening to music more on their PlayStation Portable [compared to three months ago] and this feature also yields the highest average hours (5.8) among PlayStation Portable owners.

DS„

„"Ninety two percent of Nintendo DS owners are playing games by themselves followed by close to one quarter playing games with friends locally using one game cartridge.„"

"Nintendo DS owners are spending an average of 4.6 hours a week playing games by themselves which outweighs all other game play methods (with friends using one game cartridge, multiple game cartridges or WiFi)."

Apple

"Listening to music dominates iPod usage (96 percent) followed by playing games (20 percent) at a distant second."

"„„iPhones are being treated as entertainment devices. Thirty percent or more iPhone owners are utilizing all of the available features with the exception of watching movies (19 percent) and using business related applications (14 percent)."

"Among iPhone users specifically, the application with the greatest increase in use over the last three months was playing games."

NPD's data was collected from over 3,200 pre-identified sample owners of portable devices from September 16-23.

http://www.edge-online.com/news/port...abits-revealed

[Justinistheman]

Well i guess im part of the 79% because i am laways playing my ds at home and i would say that i spend 90% out of all the tim on my ds at home and the other 10% not at home

[Flygon]

They had no mention of watching movies on the DS, I'm disappointed.

[Okami_Ninja]

Because contrary to popular belief the majority of ds users do not own a flash cart for the ds and the d was not designed in any way commercial to support video play back, thus an official study on NDS usage of course is not going to include movies.

[goshogun1]

Yeah, I am part of that 79% for primary home ds uses. Mostly because it's nice lying in bed playing it. Not to mention hooking up my surround system and sub-woofer. Really, it's because the DS has the games I want to play, more-so than any other system I own.

[policrat]

A more honest question would be: who can use it outside? I've never used an iPhone, but the PSP and DS screens have serious reflection problems. I can't even be near a window in the daytime now that it's summer.

[WhizzBang]

I have not found the DS to be practical for using outside. When I play games outside of the house it is mostly because I am traveling somewhere. As buses, trains and metros can often be bumpy I find that playing DS games that require a stylus difficult, and have made mistakes at crucial moments due to a sudden bump on my journey.

I mostly use my music player or my GP32 for journeys at the moment.