The Daedalus Project: WoW Basic Demographics: Print This

Apart from presenting the basic demographics from both RL (age, gender) and in-game (class, race), the goal of this short article is also to anchor the survey data with comprehensive WoW census data (from WarcraftRealms.com). While demonstrating consistency between the two sets of data doesn't mean that there is no sampling bias with the survey data, it does make it more plausible that the survey data is representative of a large percentage of WoW players. This kind of comparison with perfect comprehensive data has been mostly impossible with my past data sets, so I'm glad that this comparison can be made to anchor the other articles in this issue of the Daedalus Project.

I'll start with the in-game demographics and make direct comparisons with census data from WarcraftRealms.com from the same time period (June 2005). The distribution of the 8 races match up pretty well. With the distribution of the 9 classes, Priests and Warriors seem to be off a little.

In terms of Alliance / Horde ratio, the numbers match up pretty well. WarcraftRealms has a ratio of 1.6:1. The survey data has a ratio of 1.7:1 (646 Alliance vs. 373 Horde characters).

From the survey data, the average age of the WoW player is 28.3 (SD = 8.4). 84% of players are male. 16% are female. Female players are significantly older (M = 32.5, SD = 10.0) than male players (M = 28.0, SD = 8.4). On average, they spend 22.7 (SD = 14.1) hours per week playing WoW. There are no gender differences in hours played per week.