Nielsen: Gamers Spend More Time Playing

As the data released by the NPD Group showed, the month of June registered a drop of 31% in the amount of money customers in the United States spent on videogames. But a different set of indicators, this time coming from Nielsen, is showing that even as spending plummeted, the amount of time that players spent with their gaming consoles increased almost as spectacularly, with the medium value rising by about 21%.

The statistical average console gamer used 768 minutes playing videogames during the month of June. This basically means that each day of the month, the average person spent 28 minutes playing something on a gaming console. When it comes to platforms, the PlayStation 2, which is almost one decade old, is still being the most used, barely edging out the Xbox 360. The PlayStation 3 is in third position, with the Wii following.

When Nielsen looked at the more hardcore users that it defines as “active,” the situation was drastically different. The Xbox 360 was the console on which players spent the most time, followed by the PlayStation 3. The Nintendo Wii is dead last, beaten in the amount of time played by active users even by the GameCube and the original Xbox. This seems to confirm the casual nature of most of the gaming conducted on the Nintendo platform.

When it comes to gender, the platforms are pretty much balanced, except for the Wii, which attracted a high percentage of women players, and the Xbox 360, which is male dominated. Nielsen is also saying that most of the play time it has tracked was logged in by players under the age of 18.

But the most important element of the report seems to be that players are turning to videogames more and more as means to entertain themselves while also limiting the amount of money they pay for them, which is quite the paradox.