WoW #1 in new Nielsen game ranking system
by Robin Torres 
Jul 27th 2007 at 11:00AM
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?
Filed under: Odds and ends, News items
