New York (NY) - Step aside next-gen gaming systems, because the king of the last generation is still here to play, accounting for 42% of all game use last month.

According to a new Nielsen report, the Xbox 360, Wii, and Playstation 3 scored a combined share of only 13.5%.  Nielsen's data even showed the Gamecube at 5.8%, above the Wii.

Specifically, the Xbox 360 counted for 8% of game time in the US, with the Wii at 4% and the PS3 barely ranking in with 1.5%.  The original Xbox took second place with 17%.

It's a new analytic research field for Nielsen that uses a rather unscientific method of just polling its existing 12,000 households in the Nielsen TV group.

Still, it underlines the importance of past consoles.  Though Nielsen showed the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube as three of the four most played systems last month, only the PS2 still has support from the company that made it.  Microsoft has stopped producing the original Xbox and Nintendo doesn't even like to talk about the Gamecube anymore.

Nielsen also said that a total of 68 million people played console video games last month. 

hmmm

Jul 26, 2007 11:28     

so they poll 0.017% of the supposed 68 million people playing console video games and they think they have a good base? riiiiiiiight
havanger report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

How could they possibly know this?

Jul 26, 2007 11:33     

Sounds like BS to me.
Guilty report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Backwards compatibility

Jul 26, 2007 11:55     

I wonder if the GCN players were actually playing GCN games on their Wii!
WiiDude report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

re: hmmm

Jul 26, 2007 12:07     

That's 0.000176%
Chris Showers report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

It's called Statistics

Jul 26, 2007 12:08     

It's pretty easy to do too. Say you want to know how many pages are in a novel... pinch about a quarter of the pages by the side (sample), count how many pages are in that sample (sampling) or you can look at the highest page number (and take away the lowest page number). Since you only did a quarter, you multiply the number by 4 to get one whole (4 quarter = 1 whole). Now the number you get is going to be pretty close to the total number of pages. It's just easier than counting the entire population.

Zen report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

how good shows are cancled

Jul 26, 2007 12:08     

That's how they do ratings for TV shows. They poll the same 12,000 households to generate such gems as the 18 to 36 yearold male demographic and the 12 to 24 yearold female demographic. This is why great shows like Farscape are cancled due to low ratings despite massive fan bases.
Joe report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

sampling

Jul 26, 2007 12:48     

12k is a large enough sample size. The issue is how random is the 12k household vs the 68 million population. My guess is that these are lagging indicators. (by a few months)
chewy report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Statistics....what crap.

Jul 26, 2007 12:53     

When they start throwing out statistics I always ask what are they not telling you. For example lets just say "hypothetically" some company says 90% of all unnatural deaths occured because of guns. Okay sounds pretty bad. Well that did not tell you how much of that 90% was due to police shooting a criminal or a civilian using justifed force to protect himself, hunting accidents, or the like. Now things are starting to look a little misleading (remember this was hypothetical not stating any fact here). Show I treat any statistics with a gain of salt.

Parrdacc report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

I work in research - not Nielson

Jul 26, 2007 13:08     

12,000 is a large base for a study like this. You may be skeptical, but when you pull a sample correctly, you do not need to interview a large group in order to accurately project to the general population. The question I would ask about the research is, of those PS2 players, how many ALSO played next gen?
Ryan report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Matches NPD Stats

Jul 26, 2007 13:12     

NPD has been reporting that that the PS2 was indeed outselling all other consoles (except maybe the Wii) in the past six months. That's according to their monthly updates that TG Daily has been releasing. The PS2 is the cheapest TV top console and the graphics are still pretty decent. Couple that with the massive game library it has. It's a good time to buy consoles at the end of their service lives. We're not seeing massive leaps in performance like we did in the 90s so it's not such a big deal to still be playing the previous generation.

Mike report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

The PS2 has been around for a long time and it has ...

Jul 26, 2007 14:05     

The PS2 has been around for a long time and it has lots great games. With that in mind, I think it is easy to believe that it is the most played console. Come on, good games still come out for it.
Mike report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Re: It's called Statistics

Jul 26, 2007 14:44     

That's not really a fair analogy. All you're doing is dividing by (about) four and then multiplying by four. If you want to use a book as an example, let's say, count the number of times the word "the" appears on the first ten pages, then multiply that by the total number of pages and divide by ten.
Justin report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Sounds like its time to upgrade people..

Jul 26, 2007 16:42     

what the... a PS2? LOL Get with the program folks! I'm already thinking about PS4 and quad core Cpus. Read and get informed and work hard and get the good stuff like I do. Im almost 40 but still keep up with this stuff,a PS2 most played ha..yawn!
Barry L report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Not surprising

Jul 26, 2007 16:45     

considering that more PS2s have been sold than all the other consoles listed combined, you don't have to go out on a limb to claim the PS2 is the most played game console, let a lone do a survey to confirm it.
Matt report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Not surprised ethier

Jul 27, 2007 00:37     

Really how many people with families can afford some of the new gen Machines? We are still selling as many PS 2's as the PS3. PS2's are a good price now.
martinjs report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

re: How could they possibly know this?

Jul 29, 2007 05:08     

It's called a random sample.
NoIncentive report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0