Nielsen's GamePlay Metrics

I'd be much more enthusiastic about the news (via Gamespot) that ratings giant Nielsen are planning to start gathering statistical data on videogame usage from their 10,000 sample households if I thought they were going to share some of this information freely.

Comments

[Patrick]

You should read the comments, the problem suggested isn't that its sold (if it can save money, and it costs money, then its probably worth money) but the limited survey scope of Nielsen households. 10,000 is WAY too limited, and the side-effects can be quite harmful in terms of niche or art products being represented.

[Chris]

10,000 households is considerably less limited than zero households - I'll take any data we can get, no matter how limited. :)

[translucy]

Chris,

if you are interested in the German game market (and if you're curious what EA is messing around with there - gamer typology wise - follow
http://www.spielplatz-deutschland.de/

"playground germany" is the title of a study based on a panel survey of gamers older 14 conducted in 2005.

I guess the 5-tier typology EA and the advertising company JungvonMatt are proposing won't be news to you - but figuring it out in German might be :)

And it has loads of pictures from panel participant's house holds - including what their fridges look like from the inside (no frozen pizza there? - astounding!)

Enjoy!

[Chris]

Thanks for the link!

It seems they have:

Leisure Players (54%)
Habit Players (24%)
Intensive Players (5%)
Fantasy Players (6%)
Thinking Players (11%)

Thinking Players appears to be the same as DGD1 Manager (Strategic Player), and the proportions are about right. Leisure Players represent an undifferentiated Casual market split (C1-4 in DGD1). Habit and Intesive Players seem to be two different degrees of Hardcore players, probably H1 divided into subclusters (or something similar). I'm guessing Fantasy Players is similar to H3 Wanderer in DGD1. At least, so it seems to me with my rudamentary grasp of German. :)

Seems like a perfectly fine audience model for what it is, although not breaking down the Leisure Players probably misses some useful distinctions.

Thanks for pointing it out! Always glad to see what's out there. I wonder if they'll issue an English language version of the report?

[translucy]

Seems to me that your German is good enough for this job ;-)

The main difference they seem to make between "habit" and "intensive" is age and job/family, so the habit player is around 30 has a (well-paying) job and fiancee/wife or husband/kids/... "intensives" are 20 and in college... "wanderer" seems to be about right..."thinking" equals "strategic".

No english version I'm afraid (except as an internal paper from EA maybe?) The study in my view is aimed at German policy makers and media people to mollify their criticisms/prejudices... as you may know Germany had a terrible school massacre about 4 years ago. The 19-year old male killer who shot himself afterwards had FPS experience which of course led to a fierce public debate over the banning of violent games.

[Chris]

Germany has always been very sensitive to the issues of videogames and society for some reason.

Thanks for the clarifications regarding this audience data; it's interesting to see how closely this backs up the original DGD1 study, actually. I guess our research was more reliable than I originally thought! :)

[translucy]

"Germany has always been very sensitive to the issues of videogames and society for some reason."

Reading H. Arendt can give you a lot more perspective on "The Reason"...