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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.