Sony’s PlayStation 2 accounted for 42% of video-game console usage during June, and PC gamers played “World of Warcraft”more than four times as much as any other PC game, Nielsen reported Thursday as it launched Nielsen GamePlay Metrics, which electronically tracks video-game console usage and games played on PCs.
The new service found that 68.1 million individuals used a video-game console in June, playing an average of 7.5 days during the month. On the days they played,
Xbox 360
users logged an average of 2.2 sessions, with an average session length of 61 minutes. In contrast,
PlayStation 3
users logged an average of 1.9 sessions, with an average session length of 83 minutes, on the days they played.
Nielsen GamePlay Metrics provides electronic ratings and proprietary survey data to show who is playing games, on which systems, at what times and, when integrated with other Nielsen data, illustrates which other media platforms are also engaging gamers and which consumer goods they’re likely to buy.
Ultimately, GamePlay Metrics will establish a metric that can be used for buying and selling dynamic and static advertisements in PC and console video games.
World of Warcraft, from Blizzard Entertainment, was the most-played PC game in June, according to GamePlay Metrics, outranking the next-most-played game by four times. In addition toWorld of Warcraft, the top five PC games for June included“Halo: Combat Evolved” and“Halo 2” from Microsoft Game Studios,“The Sims” from Electronic Arts and“RuneScape” from Jagex. Legacy blockbuster franchises with strong customizable communities (“modders”) like“Grand Theft Auto” and“Counter-Strike” rounded out the top 10.
Nielsen GamePlay Metrics uses console data collected from Nielsen’s People Meter TV sample combined with Nielsen GamePlay Metrics’ proprietary audio-signature library that matches the unique audio signature of every game tracked on the six most widely available video-game consoles -- PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox, Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii and GameCube. The GamePlay Metrics user sample includes more than 12,000 households with approximately 33,000 individuals.
