1) There are many adults over 30 who play the Wii. These people do not have time to play for more than an hour a night, what with all their other responsibilities. (You have to laugh at the average user who is age 6-11, according to Neilson, and has an average income of 75k+.)

2) Neilson has never contacted me, or anybody I know. I've never trusted this supposed data that they gather.

Neilson doesn't contactact everybody in the nation. They do scientific polling just for television viewers. They get a representative sample, it is scientific and very close. Look how accurate the polling was for the election. Obama won every single state polls said he was going to win. Even red states like Indiana,N, carolina, nevada, colorado, etc. They were spot on.

Pfft. Nielsen. Let's compare their statistics against the Nintendo Channel statistics, and maybe we'll come to something closely resembling the truth.

nielsen it's very reliable from the stadistic point of view.
but they only include the US.

en europe and japan there is a different story.

I'm going to skip over most of the comments and assume a bunch of Wii fans came in here, bashed STATISTICS, and said they were "generalizing" or "untrue"

I saw this ealier and it baffled me, it still do. Why don't they use the same demographic for all the console?  If they do it that way because that is the age group the console got the highest percentage of player in, it still make the whole thing enormously incomplete, and that not counting the +75k income.

Still it's some new info which is alway nice. I don't see why Nelson do it though, it's not really useful info except maybe for some gamer to play "my dick is bigger than yours" game, always a favorite. What matter for publisher and console maker is sale, once they bought the game what do they care if the buyer play it a lot or not? It's like tracking how many times by average people watch the DVD they bought. Who cares?

In second though, TV network probably care a whole lot, which is probably why the demo for income and age are set that way and why Nelson would track this in the first place, not for game publisher but for the TV network who got the most money from advertiser to sell stuff to these age group and income. If they play game all the time and don't watch TV that not good for them.

Btw, here easy number to read instead of graph that nobody seem to bother to understand. Let the game continue!

Wii - 516.2 minutes of playtime in average for December 2008

PS3 - 1053.2 minutes of playtime in average for December 2008

360 - 1190.7 minutes of playtime in average for December 2008

Wow so Wii is only twice as played as PS3? Thats crazy.

So either PS3 should be at 24.33 million sales or Wii should be down to 42.90 to make the ratio the same. And no real shock PS2 is most played. Its got a massive 130+ million userbase. I'm shocked Xbox and GC are played at all still.

Consider the following two households:

The Johnstons is a family of 5 (Mother, Father, teenage daughter, with two sons [4 and 11]) who own a Wii which receives an average of 50 hours of playtime a week (Mother - 5 hours, Father - 7 hours, Teenage Daughter - 8 hours, and each son plays for 15 hours)

The Smiths are a family of 5 (Mother, Father, teenage daughter, with two sons [4 and 11]) who own a PS3 which receives an average of 40 hours of playtime a week (Mother - 0 hours, Father - 10 hours, Teenage Daughter - 0 hours, and each son plays for 15 hours)

How would this data be interpreted by the Nielsen survey? Depending on the methodology taken you could have completely opposite interpretations of the Data ... On top of that, there is a great deal of difficulty accurately collecting data about users of a system which is more likely to have multiple users in a household based on a survey, because the person you talk to may be able to accurately report their own usage but is unlikely to report someone else's use accurately.

The fact is that the Wii sells a similar ammount of software per system sold as either other console, so the "Lower" play-time per user of the system has to be roughly balanced out by an increase in the number of users per system.

The reality is that multiple console users are a small segment of the population. Probably 1% and they put that into consideration. Most familyies are not shelling out $800 on multiple consoles plus games. That's hard core. 80% of this generation has chosen wii/60 according to VGC. $200-$300 seems to be the theshhold.

That also explains why the ps3 demographic is mostly males 25-34. Its the top 20% most hard core group of gammer elitists.