Report: Sales data undersells true reach of games

There seems to be a slight obsession with measuring the size of the video game market recently. First TV ratings experts Nielsen Media Research estimated nearly 46 million U.S. households have a game console. Then Scarborough Research ranked major U.S. cities based on console ownership. Now, Gameasure has issued a report saying simple sales metrics might be under-reporting the true reach of video games.

The research group noted in a recent press release that video game sales don't take into account the true number of players created by "social game play, rental, used sales and pass-around." For example, while NPD estimates 2 million people bought Call of Duty 2 in North America, Gameasure estimates that 9 million North Americans have actually played the game. Such data is key to evaluating the effectiveness of in-game advertising, which cares more about individual eyeballs than game sales.

While it's hard to know how reliable Gameasure's estimates are, it's nice to see somebody attempting to go past the sales numbers to estimate the true size of the game market.