http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/mi6-inside-answers-from-nielsen-games-/?biz=1
Following his presentation at the MI6 Conference this week in San Francisco, we chatted with Nielsen Games' Gerardo Guzman to discuss some video game metrics.
Posted by N. Evan Van Zelfden on Thursday, April 10, 2008
"We could have presented the whole study here, but it would have taken four days," joked Gerardo Guzman, during his in-depth presentation to the audience of marketers, ad people, and brand specialists at the MI6 Conference in San Francisco.
Guzman is the director of business development and product strategy at Nielsen Games, a relatively new facet of the storied metrics firm that's been a staple of Madison Avenue and broadcast for years.
Just the surface material presented was still fascinating and rapid. Afterwards, GameDaily BIZ sat down with Guzman for an exclusive chat about the numbers and tidbits that drive the game industry.
BIZ: What question do game publishers ask you most often?
Guzman: The two most popular questions that we get are "How can we advance advertising within video games overall?" and "How can I know the consumer I'm trying to sell to?" Those are things publishers active in in-game advertising are thinking about.
"What we see is that PS2 still has a very high share of usage. Again, that's because of its longevity in the market."
BIZ: And your MI6 talk is about defining that consumer?
Guzman: It was a presentation to help better understand that consumer. There's a lot of research out there focused on what a particular video game consumer's tastes are and how they play a video game, and then how that can maybe help sell the next video game.
We wanted to provide a more broad and contextual view of the consumer – starting with the base point of a very large sample of 55,000, and mapping that to the U.S. census demographic, to say "where does the videogamer fit in to the overall U.S. consumer market?"
BIZ: Where does the video game consumer shop?
Guzman: For general merchandising stores, they tend to follow the national trend, but the one piece of information that we found out there is that the videogamer across all platforms – console, mobile, handhelds, and PC – tends to shop more at Target.
BIZ: Interesting. Care to speculate on why that is?
Guzman: We have a lot of speculations, but right now, we haven't dived deep enough into the data to come up with a firm story.
BIZ: What sort of magazines do they read?
Guzman: Again, they tend to read less overall, however when they do read magazines, what we found out from a general list of consumer magazines is they tend to read Time, National Geographic, and Maxim, I believe.
BIZ: What about console usage?
Guzman: Console usage, that's electronically measured through our Nielsen Television Panel and that's part of our Gameplay Metrics service. I showed one particular slide, which is overall console usage. What we see is that PS2 still has a very high share of usage. Again, that's because of its longevity in the market; it's been out over five, six plus years [It's in its eighth year – Ed.]. But the trend is going down, as more and more consumers and households start buying and using the 'next-gen' platforms, which are the PS3, the 360, and the Wii. And we see all those trending up. But they still probably have a while to go before they catch the PS2.
