Today Neilsen announced that it will begin reporting on market data for video game usage in mid-2007. With the constant bickering on who will with future market share between Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s PS3, and Nintendo’s Wii – I guess we will finally actually guess intelligently. What isn’t clear though is exactly how Nielsen plans on gathering this data.
Nielsen GamePlay Metrics will use a patented approach to harvest this existing information from current and next-generation video game consoles within these sample households. The new service will passively record the titles of games while capturing key demographic detail about players.
Interesting. Does this mean they will simply “listen” to what the user is playing? At any rate, this should be a huge tool for video game marketers, developers and, and platform producers all around. With the additional demographics on what gamers are actually playing, expect to see more boring Madden and FPS Racer titles as well. But alas, we all really know that 89% of NASCAR fans are really playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure.