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Epoch on 11 March 2009
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Gnizmo said:

Epoch said:

Haha, I agree that it is a poor choice of term for their method of data gathering, but it's a direct quote from them.

I also agree that it is hard/impossible to discredit anything without a look at the data.  Its just that at first glance some of the numbers didn't add up, and upon further investigation, more didn't add up, lol.

I think people were trying to make more of this study than it actually says (which isn't alot), and it offended my sense of statistical reasoning.

Maybe they will release more info as they compile it.  Seems unlikely though.

 Hardly a direct quote. They use the term online consumer panel. This has very different implications than online survey. This is irrelevant though as I just realized your arguement doesn't hold up.

 You keep working under the assumption that the numbers provided in the OP are accurate. They have absolutely no basis in reality though. First off, NPD says that 56% of all gamers play online. This is a far cry from the 25% quoted in the original article. This would mean of the 20,000 people who played some game that around 11,000 of them played online. At the surface level this would seemingly back your arguement, but there is one other missing variable.

 The percentages they give for the online gaming is irrelevant. They are not saying 50% of people who game online are gaming on the 360. They are saying 50% of the people who game online on a console game on the 360. The raw number of people gaming on a console, however, is never given. All we really know is that last gen systems seemed to completely die off in terms of online gaming in the last year (PS2 and Xbox were seemingly ahead of the PS3 in the last survey). Without having the raw data to work with we cannot determine whether or not that would be representative of the population as a whole, or of just the gaming population.

"The report is based on online survey responses from just over 20,000 members of NPD’s online consumer panel ages 2 and older"

From the Methodology section of their press release.

So now we're assuming that the 20,000 people polled all play electronic games?  I was assuming it was general population.  That would be a major difference. 

I used the x360 to work with because it is one of the few pieces of actual data given in the original statement.  However, as you say, without knowing how many people actually responded, we can't determine much.

At least we seem to agree that the press release doesn't seem to be saying a whole lot, other than that online gaming is up.