When you think of a hardcore gamer you probably don’t envision someone loading up their Facebook account and checking on their crops, or visiting other players’ decked out virtual rooms.  But a recent study from hardcore social games developer Kabam shatters the stereotype of the social platform game player in light of  a rapidly growing segment — the hardcore social gamer.  These are players who play strategy, RPG, or other ‘core’ segment games (MMO, action, FPS, MOBA) on a social network site.

The Social Gamer Study, which surveyed just over 1,400 gamers in the U.S., found that about 82% of “hardcore social gamers” (someone who has played a “core” genre on a social network) also play console games, and that social game playing is “disrupting” their traditional gaming habits.

The nationally representative research survey, conducted by Information Solutions Group on behalf of Kabam, found that these hardcore social gamers are younger and mostly male, very much in line with traditional gamer demographics.  This stat dispels the commonly held belief that social gamers are predominantly middle-aged women with little or no previous game-playing experience.

Overall, 41% of U.S. internet users have played social games, although the study noted that hardcore social players will stick with a game for longer periods of time compared to casual social gamers.

On average, more than 68% of hardcore social players play for three hours or more each day, compared to 43 percent for casual social gamers. These hardcore social gamers noted that they were playing on their games consoles less, with an average 50% declining in spending.

“Gamers are migrating their playing time and the dollars they spend to social games at the expense of console and other traditional gaming platforms,” said Chris Carvalho, chief operating officer of Kabam.

Meanwhile, GameStop may think that people still like boxes, but that’s not stopping the company from diving into the digital distribution realm.  It bought up Flash game purveyor Kongregate last summer and now that acquisition just dropped a big egg on Android with the launch of Kongregate Arcade. It’s basically a separate mobile app store from the Android Market, but with a few important differences. The biggest is that these games, numbering over 300, are all free, and are all Flash-based. This is said to “solve the game discovery problem” by popping out of the Market but certainly won’t do much to solve revenue problems for devs working on premium mobile games. Of course to get all the games you’ll still need to find this app, but it’s there.