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Nielsen's First PlayMetrics Results Announced
June was the first month that Nielsen's new approach to tracking game play was fully implemented, and the statistics from last month are now out. Some sample numbers: "The company determined that 68.1 million individuals used a videogame console in June, playing an average of 7.5 days during the month. The PlayStation 2 was the most-played console, accounting for 42 per cent of the total console usage ... The Xbox 360 accounted for eight per cent of console playing time. Its users logged in an average of 2.2 sessions per day, with an average session length of 61 minutes. The PS3 accounted for 1.5 per cent of console usage. Its users logged in an average of 1.9 sessions per day with an average session length of 83 minutes-the longest playing session of all consoles studied. The Wii, by comparison, accounted for four per cent of overall console playing time. Its users logged in an average of 1.78 sessions per day with an average session length of 57 minutes." GameDaily has further demographics from the results.
It's all great fun to see numbers, but how are they coming up with them? Is there some box that people have in their living room that somehow records what system they are playing on and do these people own all systems being monitored? all games? Is this internet based traffic from machines connected to the internet? how many machines out there aren't actually online? Maybe I'm missing something but I'm not seeing any info on how the data was collected in the article.
Actually I was thinking more that that 360 had a low session time due to the high session count. Caused by the fact that games get frequent updates and whenever you update a game you have to log-off while the update takes place. It only takes a few seconds but the stats would show a regular 1 session lasting about 1 minute followed by another session lasting 2 hours... If I pop in a game that I haven't played in a month or two there is almost guaranteed to be another game update that needs to occur, and if you pop in a game for the first time, it almost always has an update available. It's sad but when I bought the darkness last week I was almost shocked that it didn't have to update but instead just played straight away.
Obviously that would give you an average session of about an hour but it's not a very accurate statistic because despite the fact that the system logs it as two separate sessions it really is just one. There is no description about accounting for this and it sounds like they're using the built in profile system which would lead me to believe that they're not.
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Alternatively, they may be just counting it as multiple sessions when I play Geometry Wars for 10 minutes before loading Forza 2, or when I stop playing for a couple of minutes to chat with one of my friends who has popped online before going back to the game. There are all sorts of things that 360 owners regularly do that could be breaking one "session" of sitting down to use it into little bits.
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