Which consoles are played the most?

[Kire]

Seems that Nielsen has the answer.

http://kotaku.com/gaming/nielsen-gam...yed-282743.php

"Sony's Playstation 2 accounted for 42 percent of video game console usage during June far outstripping the Xbox, which had the second highest usage at 17 percent, according to Nielsen's latest GamePlay Metrics. Rounding up the list of consoles was the Playstation 3 with just 1.5 percent of usage and the Wii with four percent."

Not very shocking to me, but it's interesting to see that the sell rate of Wiis isn't matching how much they're played (something I suspected). W/ more guitar heroes on the horizon, ps2 isn't going anywhere.

[Red Dragon]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

Because more people own a PS2 and 360. Heck, GAMECUBE beat the Wii and PS3.

[Kire]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

Well, I thought there were only twice as many 360s out there, but the 360 play rate is 4 times bigger...so couldn't you conclude the the 360 is being played twice as much?

[DarkwingChuck]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

Yeah, somebody needs to do a percentage by number sold and amount played for it to really be telling you anything but I think it'll rank about the same.

[Kire]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

crap, my bad...the ORIGINAL Xbox is getting that 17% and 360 has 8%...for some reason I thought they meant the 360...so I guess they do match up to being evenly played.

[Red Dragon]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

...

[Kire]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

don't gimmie the Shadow treatment.

[gray]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

so, wait, now the ps2 is sonys competition against the wii and 360?

[Valkysas]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

the article said that this is all based off around 12,000 households. thats a terrible way of measuring things. what if a majority of these households just don't own more than one game system? hell, what if most don't own any?

[Big Rick Cook]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

Completely unreliable polls are my guess.

Or possibly BUGS IN UR HOUZES.

[H2SO4]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

87% of statistics are made up on the spot.

[Maijo]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

87% of statistics are made up on the spot.

[Shard]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

the article said that this is all based off around 12,000 households. thats a terrible way of measuring things. what if a majority of these households just don't own more than one game system? hell, what if most don't own any?

Representative samples are a pretty standard way of doing polls, with methodologies that can be pretty rigorous. When doing accurate surveys it's phenomenally difficult and costly to obtain good data sets (and impossible to get anything remotely close to a majority of whatever you're studying without spending millions upon millions of dollars). 12,000 is a reasonably large amount of respondents. The article says those 12,000 households were taken from:

Nielsen GamePlay Metrics uses PC data collected from the Nielsen's Video Game Tracking Survey. Video Game Tracking is a weekly online survey of 1200 gamers 7 - 54 years of age. Qualifications include ownership of a console or PC, play video games at least 1 hour per week and have purchased at least one or more video games in the last 6 months. The Video Game Tracking online survey has been in the field for more than two years (104+ weeks).

So they're all gaming households, and all relatively active. And Nielsen's ratings aren't exactly some guys tinkering away in their mom's basement. They pretty much set the benchmarks for a billion dollar industry (TV Programming). What they don't do, is distinguish between different gaming tastes culturally. In terms of sample error, you may have some skewing of it in people that don't respond to surveys, but that's usually a minimal impact.

If nothing else, Sony's taking the results seriously:

On July 5, 2007 Nielsen announced a collaborative agreement with Sony Computer Entertainment America to develop a measurement system for computer game advertising that includes the sharing of video game console data. The Nielsen-Sony data will also be provided within GamePlay Metrics service in the near future.

[DarkwingChuck]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

I might be misunderstanding the article but I think you're a little mistaken Shard. The PC game data was based on the online survey of 1200 gamers but the console info comes from the 12,000 households which was gathered through tracking audio signatures in games. But that doesn't change the point you're making which is correct.

[Shard]

Re: Which consoles are played the most?

No, they (NVGTS) survey 1200 gamers weekly, their database is much larger. It isn't the same 1200 gamers every week. They just culled the 12,000 households from the much larger database. And those 12,000 households represent an estimated 33,000 gamers. The audio signatures were used to identify which platforms and which games were being played.