NPD reports decline in core gamers (but doesn’t include Nintendo or handheld gamers)

NPD came out with a ‘Core Gaming 2014 Snapshot Report’ which came out with a ridiculous conclusion based on some questionable assumptions.

Basically, they reported a decline in core gamers from 14 to 12 percent, their definition of this being people who own a core gaming device, and play games for longer than 5 hours per week.

Now here’s where things get questionable. Their definition of core devices are Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PC, or Mac. No Nintendo devices, and for that matter, Sony’s Playstation Vita also gets the shaft.

This seems to be seriously biased towards Nintendo and handhelds, but more importantly, it paints a misleading picture of where the industry is. I already shared a screenshot, but you can download the report and decide for yourself (requires email form sign up) here.