Older Consumers Adopt Handheld Gaming

"Historically, handhelds, being dominated by the Nintendo GameBoy, was focused on the youth market," Job Lawrence, product manager of IGN's GamerMetrics, told ClickZ Stats. "People who grew up with games as kids are now in their thirties, which matches our audience demographic."

"What we see is less of a cannibalization of the console market from dedicated handheld systems, and more of a complimentary effect," comments Jay Horwitz, senior analyst at Jupiter Research. "For most gamers, handhelds are not substitutes for consoles."

The GamerMetrics report is collected from user behavior tracked on IGN's properties including the IGN.com and GameSpy editorial sites, download portal FilePlanet, and a recently launched program to provide ads in games across all platforms.