Nielsen's State of the Video Gamer study, released Tuesday, indicates that Wii owners use their console less than Xbox 360 and PS3 owners. The research firm said Wii owners used their consoles 6.8 percent of the total amount of time that they could have used the system during Nielsen's measurement period during December 2008.

This compares to Xbox 360's "Active User Percentage" of 11.4 percent and PS3's 10.6 percent, which both led the way amongst current and last-gen consoles. In average usage days, Wii trailed all other consoles except for GameCube with five days (GameCube had 4.5 days). PS3 and Xbox 360 were used 6.8 and 7.1 days average, respectively. Wii also was last in terms of daily average number of sessions with 1.78 sessions, versus 2.42 for PS3 and 2.15 for Xbox 360.

Nielsen noted that Xbox 360 and PS3 have more features (particularly multimedia capabilities) than other consoles measured in the survey, which would lead to more usage. "Predominant users of the Wii and GameCube are likely to use these consoles at most once a week and for fewer minutes and the fewest number of sessions compared to the other two groups of consoles," the study read. Nielsen's sample includes 17K U.S. television households. More trends can be found in Nielsen's report (pdf).