Not much by way of choices this week on the US Wii Shop Channel. From the WiiWare service we get Magnetica Twist, and from the Virtual Console we get Fatal Fury 2. Details in the full article.

A study, commissioned by PopCap Games, showed that women love a good game of Cake Mania, and they aren't shy about it. After media content providers were determined to deliver advertisements catering to the young male bracket on consoles, the study by Information Solutions Group (ISG) reveals that casual gamers are "predominantly female."

Looking for numbers? Try 76% casual gamers that are female against 24% male casual gamers. And even over at Yahoo! Games and Electronic Arts casual gaming bet Pogo, more casual gamers are female.

The non-gamer bracket that included your girlfriend and your grandmother is now blessed with a gamers' edge on Zuma, thanks to the simplistic, yet entertaining casual game. With Miyamoto's previous speech on catering the Nintendo Wii to women, it's now clear that introducing games to the female bracket shows just how big of a market the game industry can tap into.

The games women play may not be "hardcore," but it's a start for toning hand-eye coordination technique and basic game mechanics. Females are entering the mainstream gaming scene, and not as promo girls on the side (mind you).

Even if the hardcore gamers are predominantly male, it's no indication that it should stay that way. There are already girl gamers around in the professional gaming scene, and it won't be a surprise if that increased this year, too.

One such study back in 2006 highlighted that 42% of adult console gamers were female, and the rest were male. In a broader scale, PC and console games were played by more males than females: 62% against 38%. So in essence, the gaming demographics is becoming more evenly distributed as time rolls on.

And with the success of the Nintendo Wii and MMO games, this year could spell the game industry's renewed focus on delivering games to gamers, and not games to males only.

If you look at the lineup of games for the said consoles, most of them are geared for your typical hard-core gamer - tough, challenging games that require you to rack up hours of play before you can duke it out online without looking like a klutzy noob.

Then there's casual games: simple and addictive packages you'll usually be playing in your mobiles, iPods or PDAs. These are the kind of games that PopCap Games is known for.

Known for developing the highly popular Bejeweled 2 and Zuma games, PopCap has already had considerable success in light of the mainstream gaming industry - the release of their games on XBLA, and their recent network collaborations with Valve Software among their recent successes.

These days, they're aiming for wider horizons as CEO David Roberts discusses, in a recent interview by Next Generation's Kris Graft, PopCap's plans in light of the soon-to-be-released PS3 and Wii.

With regards to the upcoming XBLA-ish features he had seen on their future consoles, Roberts commented that while a lot of work had already been done on these two consoles, they were bit behind in comparison to the XBLA. Noting that Microsoft had the time advantage with regards to networking and how it would take a bit more effort for Sony and Nintendo to hold their ground with regards to this.

“The first time I saw XBLA was before they shipped it, and I was truly astounded at how much work they had done to make the kind of ecosystem around it. It seems like it’s simple, but like a lot of things that seem simple, there’s a lot of work that went on to make it that way, " Roberts said.

In connection with this, Roberts also had much to say about their recent collaboration with Valve, specifically how he feels that even hardcore gamers could enjoy the occasional casual game.

“The games are still fun, and just because women over 40 like playing Bejeweled and Zuma doesn’t mean that they are the only people that play Bejeweled and Zuma. You know, we don’t make ‘games for girls.’ A lot of people think that’s what casual games are; that they’re games designed specifically for women over thirty-five." as he said with regards to this.

Roberts plans to venture into PS3 and Wii's gaming selections in the near future with this mindset, believing that their line-up of games would be welcome for both the casual mainstream players, and the more hardcore community.

While some of the more hardcore dudes out there might cry foul over this seeming waste of the said console's other features, we think they just might be on to a niche market that the Sony and Nintendo bigwigs haven't really looked into. Feel free to read the source link to read the full interview.

According to a new study released earlier this week by Nielsen Entertainment in their third annual Active Gamer Benchmark Study, women make up 64% of North America's 117 million online gamers - and we aren't lying. The study did not reveal any particular genre or game type that were being played by women, but it is expected that online browser games such as Zuma on various flash websites made up a large proportion of the female online gamers. Although many traditional online games such as Halo or CounterStrike were primarily aimed towards males, the rise of RPGs and large-scale online titles such as World of Warcraft appear to have attracted more female gamers to the online scene.

Another surprising result from the latest study is the amount of older gamers that are also interested in online gaming. As you'd expect, the teenage market dominates any other age group in numbers, but the study does say that more than 15 million gamers (about 8%) are actually at least 45 years old. The study involved 2,200 gamers described as "active" who were 13 years or older and owned a gaming device and played games at least once a week.