This thread is absolutely terrible. People still use "hardcore" gamer unironically. People think this really wide study is invalid because this niche site as different values than it. People assume that if you're gaming on mobile, it HAS to be Candy Crush and Flappy Bird.

If someone buys thier PS3 as a Blue Ray Player and plays games occasionally, nobody is gonna question why they bought the PS3, but if it's a phone suddenly the world's biggest magnifying glass is put on them and everything explained away so that we can pretend the definitions, opinions, statistics and views from the wider society about gaming have been the same for the past 50 years and happen to fall in line with what we think.

Just dreadful.

Neither get I

And by people, you mean 1 person who used the word invalid.  Hyperbole man, hoooooooooooooooooooooooo!

For all the non-edge of the cliff type folks, they've made a decent effort explaining their thoughts/concerns regarding the study.

I don't see what's so great about League of Legends. :/

It definitely wasnt just one person.

People who game on phones/social gamers need to somehow validate thier game playing a lot more than we expect other gamers to, because of the stigma we have against phones. Nobody cares how much that kid who got an Xbox One for christmas and plays minecraft and COD knows about the wider gaming market.

More hyperbole.  Clearly, some people care.  And clearly, not every gamer is a kid.  Or...did you not read anything in the report?   And who has a stigma against phones (More hyperbole?).  Haven't seen anyone say they hate phones, or that they live in a 'no phone household'.   Clearly there's an issue with labeling freemium games in the same category as your $60 software.  But, that'd be a stigma against freemium games, not phones.

Maybe not with that game, but that is in many ways a "Gateway Drug."  It may be candy crush now, but it could possibly opens their mind to other gaming possibilities they would have previously written off.

People said the same stuff about the Wii, and yet it brought gaming to a lot of "Non-Gamers."  That is never a bad thing.

So this is counting mobile gaming? if so I'm out.

That's definitely true, and it'd be an interesting study to find a linkage between freemium/social media games and those who go into gaming further as a result.  Much of the stigma could simply be lack of knowledge around others gaming habits.  Entirely plausible, but there's really not any studies that prove it definitively either.  What we do know is that your retail/digital $60 show nowhere near the kind of active user population as some of these freemium titles.   So, that would stand in contrast to assuming they're a gateway for a large portion of those individuals.

No, the issue people have is if it is a phone which is a phone used only as a phone 99.9% of the time and then they sit on the toilet for 3 mins and play a game of snake on it they aren't a part of the 22billion dollar gaming industry and that phone was not purchased for gaming.