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Nielsen report reveals average game console usage
The Nielsen group has released a new report on usage of the three major consoles. Coming as little surprise, Nielsen's study has placed Wii in dead last, with the average player using the console 6.8 percent of the time during Nielsen's study in December, 2008. During that same period, those involved in the study played Xbox 360 10.2 percent and PS3 10.6 percent -- nearly double the Wii average. Clearly, the average gamer doesn't have the endurance necessary for long-term waggling.Wii also ranked the lowest in average days used over the course of the study, with users only partaking an average of 5 days (so much for that Wii Fit vow). The PS3 ranked second place, with users spending an average of 6.8 days days, which leaves us with Xbox 360 -- the top dog in this category -- with an average of 7.1 days.Lastly, Nielsen tracked the daily average number of sessions, and, again, Wii was last with 1.78 sessions, whereas the Xbox 360 and PS3 had much higher averages of 2.15 and 2.74 sessions, respectively. So, how would you rank your console usage?Source - Nielsen report (PDF) [via Edge]
Number of DTV unready households dips below 4 percent as of March 1
More good news for the digital TV switch, as Nielsen's latest update pegs just 3.9 percent, an improvement of 570,000 homes over last month. The older you are, the more likely you're prepared as the over 55 age group is down to just 2.2 percent unready. Now that the coupon program is funded and running again we wouldn't be surprised to see even more drastic drops before June 12, we're just waiting to grab a set that lights up.
Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending February 22th, 2009
The good news for Blu is that for the fourth week in a row it has seen an increase in revenue, the bad news is that after three weeks of single digit market share, it still isn't anywhere near as good as it was at the end of last year. The reason of course is the slate of releases -- isn't it always -- which have been anything but focused on the Blu-ray demographic. Now there has been some debate about what exactly the Blu-ray demographic is, but one thing is for sure, it isn't kid movies. We witnessed this last week with Madagascar and now this week with the latest High School Musical. Just to put things into perspective, the Blu-ray version of High School Musical 3: Senior Year only managed 6 percent away from DVD, while Body of Lies managed 21 percent. Next week should be even better for Blu-ray though because there aren't anymore kid movies on the schedule, so we're going to be so bold to predict about a 15 percent overall share.
Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending February 15th, 2009
This week's Nielsen VideoScan chart is the easiest to analyze to date because it really came down to one movie; Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. You see although this title was released the week before, it was late enough in the week that most people obviously didn't get counted until this week, and boy did they. Blu-ray fans picked it up by almost 3 to 1 over the second place new release, Miracle at St. Anna, but only 8 percent of the overall population chose the Blu-ray version over the DVD -- which is exactly what Blu-ray's share was for the week of the top 20. We suppose the only good news for Blu-ray this week is that its revenues are up over 33 percent when compared to the same week last year -- this time of the season is always slow for disc sales. We don't expect next week to be much better either, but it really comes down to how many choose to pick up the Blu-ray versions of Changeling and Body of Lies.
Nielsen: Wii audience is youngest, PS3 audience is oldest
According to a recent console usage report compiled between October and December of last year by Nielsen Media Research, the Wii appeals to quite the broad spectrum of people, being especially popular among boys age 6 -11 and women age 25 - 34. Most interesting is the Wii's ability to captivate the older women audience, as the console's use by women over 35 is much higher than that of the Wii's competition. And they're apparently playing Wii Fit, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, games cited as favorites among that group.Of course, as much as the younger audience and older women flock to Wii, it still has trouble captivating that coveted 18 - 24 demographic, where the Xbox 360 and PS3 fare a lot better. For Microsoft's Xbox 360, the group getting their game on the most is males aged 12-17, and females aged 25-34. The PS3, it would seem, has the oldest male audience locked down, as the report notes that gamers who may have owned a PSOne or PS2 in the past "may have 'graduated' to the PS3 in their assumed adulthood." For both males and females, the highest usage came from the 18 - 24 group.As far as average playtime, the Wii trailed behind the others. On the Xbox 360 side, males used the console almost twice as much as females (10.2 vs. 5.4 in December), whereas usage between genders on the PS3 and Wii was much more balanced.
Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending February 8th, 2009
Whoa, some movies are just no friend to Blu-ray fans as two titles helped push the overall Nielsen VideoScan market share down to half of what it was last week, which is the lowest in six months (when the Sex in the City Movie was released). Space Buddies was really the title that push the charts down with only 3 percent of the overall sales going to Blu-ray, but the other one was The Life of Bees which was also only at 3 percent. This was just too much for Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (9 percent) and Zach and Mari Made a Porno (11 percent) to overcome. Blu-ray is still up when compared to last year and we don't see this one week as a start of a trend. Next week should definitely be better considering the solid slate of great catalog titles for Blu-ray that were released, but with no blockbusters on the calendar, we really aren't about to try and make any predictions.
Nielsen: $823 million spent on game marketing in '08
Market research firm Nielsen estimates that $823 million was spent on video game promotion in the US during 2008. Not bad, considering the region brought in $21.3 billion in sales.Edge reports the numbers come with news that Nielsen is teaming up with EEDAR to more efficiently track advertising dollars and give better ideas of where to spend cash in the troubling economic time. [Image]
Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending February 1st, 2009
Who knew that Blu-ray fans were so desperate to get their hands on The Bourne Trilogy? We sure didn't, but either way Universal has to be happy. The real news this week though is that neither Sony or Warner could be too pleased with the performance of Lakeview Terrace or Pride and Glory on Blu-ray -- at least according to the Nielsen VideoScan data courtesy of Home Media Magazine. At the same time it's funny to us to think that a Blu-ray disc managing 17 or even 9 percent away from DVD could be a bad thing in an economy like this. Speaking of which, HMM has something a little new for us. It is a graph that charts the sales of physical media against itself last year and we find it interesting how similar the graphs are, but as expected, things are slower this year. Because although Blu-ray revenue was up over 61 percent this year over last, it was only enough to make up 4 of the 24 percent drop in DVD over the same period. The immediate future is going to much of the same, as Hollywood almost never releases its blockbusters in the spring. But that being said, Blu-ray does seem to be holding its own, but needs to do a little better in order to do its job of making up for slowing DVD sales. More charts over the break, including the top 20, BD title share and top 20 DVDs.
Latest Nielsen figures put DTV unreadiness at 5.1%
As of February 1, Nielsen is calling 5.8 million homes still completely unready for the DTV transition, 5.1 percent of the population. That's up 700,000 from last month, but still apparently enough to put the kibosh on a February shutoff across the country. Albuquerque-Santa Fe still leads/trails all markets, we'll see if they get any special attention from the FCC and others over the next few months.
Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending January 25th, 2009
Another week, another record for Blu-ray on the Nielsen VideoScan charts courtesy of Home Media Magazine. The big news here is that after the holidays Blu-ray seems to be getting stronger and stronger when you compare the amount of money spent vs DVD. Now some would say this is only part of the picture, and that it's great and all that 17 percent of the home media market's revenue last week went to Blu-ray, but what they really want to know is how many discs were sold. Now don't get us wrong, we'd love to know it as well, but the fact is that this information is provided to us by Nielsen via Home Media Magazine, and we don't get to choose the stats. That being said, we understand that including both unit sales and revenues would be more complicated, and if we had to choose between the two pieces of data, we'd easily choose revenue. After all, the entire point of starting a business is to make money and you can't do that without revenue. This week the big title that shocked us was Max Payne, which easily hit number one while The Express didn't even make the top 20. The good news for Blu though is that over 20 percent of the cash spent on old Max went to the Blu version.The really good news is that at this point we expect even the worst releases to manage 6 percent, and anything but double digit market share for the week seems a distant memory.
Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending January 18th, 2009
As the reality of the so called 5th quarter hits home and both the old and new forms of package media come back down to reality, Blu-ray continues to hold its own. We assume this is because of all those Blu-ray players sold over Christmas, but it could just as well be all the sales on discs out there. The really good news from Nielsen VideoScan courtesy of Home Media Magazine though isn't the 12 percent market share, the real good news is all the new data. There are two new charts this week that are of particular interest so we're including them after the break with the usually top 20 chart. Both of the new charts are just updated version of the old ones, but updates that provide some very insightful information. The first is the Blu-ray market share vs DVD, which now thankfully only includes the top 50 Blu-ray titles rather than sorted by the share of each title. This brings us new data like the fact that even after a month, The Dark Knight still moves about 30 percent of its discs on Blu-ray. The second new chart also brings us per title market share, but this time of the top 20 titles on DVD. This makes it easy to see which titles still aren't on Blu-ray despite being released on DVD, as well as how well some of the less popular tiles on Blu-ray stack up. Like for example the fact that while My Best Friend's Girl made its debut on at number three on the DVD chart, on Blu-ray it only managed to steal away 8 percent from the incumbent. This of course will be more interesting as we move along, but for now we're just really thankful that Nielsen and HMM made the changes we've been clamoring for.
5.7% (6.5 million) U.S. homes still not DTV ready
One one hand, it's nice to see that the number of U.S. households not ready for the coming analog TV shutoff dropped to 5.7% from 7.7% back in October, but then comes the sobering realization that with 26 days to go, around 6.5 million homes still don't have the necessary equipment to get digital TV. Coming straight from the latest Nielsen report, Albuquerque-Santa Fe, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Houston top the charts for digital unready markets, with African American and Hispanic households still lagging in percentages of unready homes. Of course, we still don't know if things will take place on schedule, but barring a delay, have a look around and make sure people in your community are ready (or as ready as they can be until the coupon program is back up and running.)
Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending January 11th, 2009
That Pineapple Express is obviously pretty good stuff as it not only moved enough discs to take the number one spot, on the Nielsen VideoScan charts courtesy of Home Media Magazine, but it also outsold the mighty Dark Knight by almost three to one in its third week. Seth Rogen's latest comedy also topped the new Blu-ray rental chart -- which is new this week and posted after the break. For now we're going to skip posting the top 20 market share chart because it's useless until Nielsen will provide HMM a version without all the catalog titles. Blu-ray's top 20 market share was down this week to 13 percent, which would normally be a good week if we weren't comparing it to last week's record breaking 16 percent. At this point we're tempted to predict both formats being down next week, but after Pineapple Express surprised us this week, we'll wait and see how Appaloosa does rather than risk looking stupid again.
Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending January 4th, 2009
The fourth quarter was very good to Blu-ray and from the looks of this, the so called fifth quarter is going to be even better. According to the Nielsen VideoScan numbers, courtesy of Home Media Magazine, the market share of the top 20 titles for Blu-ray set a new record at 16 percent -- previous record was 14 percent the week The Dark Knight was released. The real encouraging part of these numbers though is the fact that only one new release made the top 10 (Eagle Eye), while the rest were more than likely new Blu-ray owners burning through their gift cards. Of course this begs the question of what will happen after the gift cards run out, but we believe that once you go Blu it's nearly impossible to go back to DVD.
Nielsen: People prefer playing original Xbox over PS3 in '08
It's not too hard to believe that people are spending more time playing on Xbox 360 or Wii than they are with the PS3. It's also not too difficult to hear that the PS2 is the most played console in 2008 -- everyone and their pet lizard owns one. However, there is one thing which stuns not only us but our comrades as well, and that is hearing that the original Xbox is roping in more gamers than the PS3 for a share of TV time. It's a bit tough to stomach, we know, but that feeling of queasiness should subside within the hour. Media research group Nielsen reports the PS3 ranks 5th in 2008's "Video Game Console Usage" from data collected during the months of January through October. In that period, PS2 took the top spot with a 31.7 percent share followed by the 360 and Wii with 17.2 and 13.4 percent, respectively. The PS3 is right under the original Xbox's 9.7 percent share by a meager difference of 2.4 percent. But hey, it's not all doom and gloom. Our choice console did beat out the GameCube by a whopping 3.3 percent. The full statistics can be found after the break.[via Joystiq]
Nielsen: 2008's most played console was ... PS2
The Nielsen Company is best known for tracking television viewership, but its quantifying of what people spend their time doing doesn't end there. It also tracks console usage among its selected households, and, for 2008 (January through October, at least), the PlayStation 2 was played more than any other.According to Nielsen's findings, PS2 accounted for 31.2% of all console usage minutes measured. Xbox 360 was a distant second with 17.2%, followed by Wii (13.4%), the original Xbox (9.7%), PS3 (7.3%), GameCube (4.6%), and "other" (16.2%). The fact that more hours were spent playing the original Xbox than PS3 is, well, surprising. PS2's dominance isn't; last we checked, there were 87.6 bazillion of them in the world (give or take a few trillion).
Nielsen: 360 the second most played console of '08
The Nielson Company (the same folks who give us television ratings) just released their scientific digits for 2008's most played video game consoles. Based on console usage, calculated using a select few Nielson households and expressed in a percentage of total console usage minutes. After the data was tabulated, Nielson has awarded the Playstation 2 the most played console of 2008. But seeing that this is an Xbox centric website, the bigger news is that the Xbox 360 took home the number two spot as the second most played console of '08. Congrats! Now about that Playstation 3 and its 5th place finish behind the original Xbox. Hmm ... Playstation 2 - 31.2% Xbox 360 - 17.2% Wii - 13.4% Xbox - 9.7% Playstation 3 - 7.3% Gamecube - 4.6% "Other" - 16.2% [Via Joystiq]
Wii clinches bronze in console usage stakes
The white coats at Nielsen have been at it again, analysing our gaming lives and charting the consoles we use most. Unlike the Nielsen study we posted about previously, this one takes into account pre-Wii/PS3/Xbox 360 platforms. This means that the PS2 stormed to a predictable, convincing victory: 30.2% of "all measured console minutes" were dedicated to Sony's nine-year-old machine. Despite its smaller user base, the Xbox 360 was second with 18.3%, while the Wii came third with 13.5% -- high enough, we feel, to put any no-doubt-hilarious Wii/dust jokes to rest. Excellently, the GameCube is following the PS3 more closely than you'd think. A quick disclaimer before you scuttle past the break to see the data in full: these numbers cover January to October 2008, there's no word on whether non-U.S. gamers were surveyed, and handhelds aren't mentioned, though are presumably bracketed in the "Others" category. Multiple console owners who are richer than us: how closely do your own habits follow this pattern?
World of Warcraft tops most played list of 2008
Nielsen Research has published its January through October numbers about the top 10 PC games and top 10 consoles by amount of time played. Once again World of Warcraft tops the charts. In fact, WoW has more time played than the other nine titles listed - combined.Coming in at position 6 is Runescape, the browser-based game that could. It had just slightly less share than The Sims 2. Numbers for only October are available on the Nielsen website and show a different makeup for numbers 2-10, with WoW still in first. We can only imagine what this data will look like for November 2008 with the added game time of those who bought Wrath of the Lich King.
Nielsen says WoW still tops the list
GameCyte has gone over the Nielsen ratings for 2008, and they're basically saying exactly what we've heard with other sites like GamerDNA: that WoW commanded PC playtime this year. On a list with such oldies on it as The Sims, CounterStrike, and even Blizzard's own Diablo II, World of Warcraft sits at the top of the charts with an average of 671 minutes (about 11 hours) played per week. This tells us two things: one, lots of people are playing World of Warcraft a lot. And two, PCs need some better games.There is an interesting trend in these numbers, especially when you compare them with last year. Last year, Nielsen claimed about 17 hours a week of playtime for WoW players, so playtime this year is actually down overall (and while we don't see month to month numbers, GameCyte says it was before the Wrath release, which makes sense). Sure, you could say that with dailies and the easier instances, players just don't have to play the game as much, but really, this seems to reflect the bigger trend: that WoW is leveling out.There are probably years left in this game -- as we said on the podcast last week, the only real way people will stop playing WoW is when Blizzard finally turns the servers off. But all the numbers we've seen definitely point to a slowing down point among the game's subscribers. Lots of people (11.5 milion) are still playing World of Warcraft a lot. But not as much as they used to.[via WorldofWar]
