AESVI, the Italian Association of Video Games Publishers, published its annual report on the state of the national market (find it here, pdf download in Italian only).

Italian Video Games Market: General Overview

The Italian Video Games market accounts for 741,908,409 Euros, comprising both Console Hardware and Video Games Software, that is a +2.3% respect to previous year. The above figure could be detailed as following:

• 474,926,533 Euros (64%) for video games software (both video games for PC and consoles)
• 266,981,877 (36%) for video games hardware (both home and portable consoles)

Going Portable

The portable share of the hardware market has grown, now accounting for 120,870,295 Euros, +31.1% (that is 756,560 sold units a +21.6% respect to 2006), while home consoles register a -1.7% with 835,433 units sold for 146,111,582 Euros (+8%).

Sex and violence do not sell

There's an interesting figure the reports highlights, that is the 80% of the video games titles belongs to the 3+, 7+ and 12+ years PEGI classification. The 3% only belongs to 18+ years titles. The Italian video gamer is for the 61% a male, 39% are female. While for her age, the following is the according table.

Italian video gamers, by age

• 4/5 years old: 3%
• 6/10 years old: 10%
• 11/14 years old: 9%
• 15/17 years old: 7%
• 18/24 years old: 17%
• 25/34 years old: 24%
• 35/44 years old: 16%
• 45/54 years old: 9%
• 55/64 years old: 3%
• over 64 years old: 2%

This is interesting, not a breaking news though, video games are not a teen age thing anymore. The 71% of the gamers are more than 18 years old, 54% of them are more than 25 years old. Reading the above table together with the age recommendation for titles tell us that 18+ games are not interesting even for adult users; it's not documented but it's an educated guess that younger users are the one more attracted by violent titles despite the fact they shouldn't be elegible to buy them.

Games genres

Talking about genres, the following are the selling values:

Console Games genres, per market value

• Adventure 18%
• Action 29.5%
• Sport 18.3%
• Racing 15%
• Strategy 2.5%
• Platform 5.8%
• Thinking 5.5%
• Simulation 1.8%
• Compilation 1.2%
• Others 2.4%

PC Games genres, per market value

• Adventure 23.1%
• Action 15.5%
• Sport 11.1%
• Racing 7.9%
• Strategy 19.2%
• Platform 0.6%
• Thinking 8.3%
• Simulation 9.8%
• Compilation 2.3%
• Others 2.1%