I certanly add to the male Wii stats cause I played that thing probably around 20 hours this whole year.

House of Dead - 6 hours
Madworld - ~3 hours
Punchout - ~2 hours
Conduit - ~ 4 hours
Wiiware/VC - ~5 hours

Alright before anyone actually belives this, how did they manage to survey every gamer on the planet? I clearly was not surveyed, im sure this is an estimation based on install base.

Do you know anything about statistics...? You don't need to survey the whole population, just a statistical sample.

without defining what "active user" means the graph showing the number of active users is pretty meaningless. horray for statistics, king of the misleadicircus.

No I dont know anything about statistics

"The active user percent tells us how often a person used their console out of the total amount of time the console could have been used during the measurement period."

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/stateofvgamer_040909_fnl.pdf

Thus, it's not about the number of "active users", but how often the console is used per user.

Here we go again with the Nielsen statistics. Same type of thing popped up earlier in the year and was deemed false after it was found out that the legend was incorrect.

12% of the 360 userbase is active.

Uh no. Someone is reading that chart wrong.

Alright how did they figure out how much time is used with a certain console by having millions of people that own a gaming console?

in short - statistics is used when collecting data is impossible.  there are hundered of millions of consoles out in the market so obviously no one will be able to ask every single person their playing habits.  BUT, if you probe a small group (say a couple hundred) you can project those results to the whole population as long as you have an unbiased sample.  Unbiased sample simply meaning the sample you have represents the entire population well (as oppose to representing one group more heavily than another). 

This is why knowing the methodology of a statisic is so important.  If this was (for intance) and internet poll the odds of the poll being accurate is low since it skews your sample population to those that are active internet users.

bottom line: any time you see a statistic you should first say to yourself "that's bullshit" and then ask "what was it you were telling me, i wasn't listening?"