Posts with tag Nielsen

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]

Nielsen, the people who tabulate the television ratings, has launched a new game ranking system called Nielsen GamePlay Metrics and WoW is ranked number one in PC Games for the month of June. This is hardly surprising with 9 million current subscribers, but the fact that it outranks the next highest PC game by more than 4 times is pretty amazing.

Where do they get their numbers? Weekly surveys as described in their press release:

Nielsen GamePlay Metrics uses PC data collected from the Nielsen's Video Game Tracking Survey. Video Game Tracking is a weekly online survey of 1200 gamers 7 - 54 years of age. Qualifications include ownership of a console or PC, play video games at least 1 hour per week and have purchased at least one or more video games in the last 6 months. The Video Game Tracking online survey has been in the field for more than two years (104+ weeks).

It is good to see a ranking system based on what games are being played instead of how many are sold. They are reporting just over 17 hours a week average WoW playtime. For a level 70, that's about 3 well run raids... or 2 torturous raid catastrophes... or 4 weeknight new boss attempts with an extra night of farming the money required for repair bills.

How do you spend your 17 hours a week?