Global gamers now total one billion, says EA

EA boss John Riccitiello has claimed that the total number of people playing videogames of some description has now burst through the 1 billion mark. With world population still under 7 billion, doesn’t that seem a lot? Not if you use JR’s criteria:

“Conservatively, if I add up mobile users that play games, social network people that play games, people that play PC games online in Asia, all this stuff, this new audience: there’s at least a billion people gaming today, compared to a couple of hundred million just five years ago. So we have five times the audience we’ve ever had and it’s growing in leaps and bounds. And it’s no longer a niche.”

And that’s SCIENCE, folks.

Okay, perhaps not. It’s actually John Riccitiello making a wild guesstimate that sounds like it’s been calculated on the back of a fag packet. But it’s certainly very eye-catching. And maybe not far off. At least, it certainly feels like about 900 million of my Facebook friends play bloody Farmville.

[NBR, via VG247]