Nielsen has released its post-E3 purchase intent charts, and coming out on the top spot is Bungie's Halo 3: ODST, getting a rating of 53% interest from surveyed gamers. In total, twelve games garnered more than 30% in purchase intent, which is defined by Nielsen as "definitely or probably interested in buying the title." Check out the top 12 in the full article.

It's time for some useless trivia! Amaze and annoy your friends with knowledge that's only interesting to fanboys!

According to a console usage report, the PS3 has the oldest gamerbase, while the Xbox 360 attracts a slightly younger base. The Wii on the other hand, has some curious tastes, attracting young boys and old women. You just can't avoid the dirty jokes with this console.

Details after the link.

The Nielsen Company has published their annual report of consumer activity for 2008. While there are lots of Top 10 lists in their report, ranging from most watched shows to most downloaded songs, what concerns us, of course, are the video game lists!

Through Nielsen Media Research's TV monitoring technology, the same technology that tracks TV ratings, some rather interesting bits of info have surfaced from their findings.

They can track a lot of different types of data coming from your TV. For example, their press release states that "Wii households are upscale. They are more likely to earn more than $100,000 income per year."

Which makes some people question as to why that's so, since the Wii is famous for being the cheapest of the next-gen consoles. Data like that would be very useful for those in the gaming industry.

Other data they have collected should bring perspective to the gaming industry at large. For example, with the console wars raging on, it's very interesting to find out that the PlayStation 2 remains the most frequently played console out there, and the original Xbox is the second. Here's a more accurate account of the data, representing the percentage of total playing time per console:

• PS2: 42.3%
• Xbox: 17%
• Xbox 360: 8%
• GameCube: 5.8%
• Wii: 4%
• PS3: 1.5%
• Other consoles: 21%

Looking at it from another point of view, Nielsen also found that the Xbox 360 had the most number of sessions a day, averaging at 2.21 sessions. The PS3 had the least, with an average of 1.88 sessions. People tend to play the PS3 longer, however. The average number of minutes people sit down and play the PS3 is 83 minutes. The PS2 and Xbox come in second place for longest hours, averaging at 62 minutes a session.

Other interesting things to note: World of Warcraft is the most popular PC game this June, constituting 18% of all PC gaming, next is Halo: Combat Evolved (3.6%), and in third place is The Sims (3.3%).

Nielsen Media Research reported that of all the TV households in the U.S., 41.1% of them (45.7 million homes) have video game consoles. Nielsen saw an 18.5% increase in console-equipped households from a 35.2% (38.6 million) in 2004. Entitled "The State of the Console," the report details on the progress of console adoption, demographics of users, and levels of console penetration on various demographics.

 

What's more surprising is that the number of TV households increased by 1.6% only, so the rise in consoles wasn't because more people bagged an HD set. And even though male gamers 18 years old and above have played consoles, those within the teenage bracket of 12 to 17 years old exhibited an extremely high level of console penetration.

Other facts pointed out by the report are:

• The number of Internet-connected console households has grown to more than 4.4 million, even before accounting for the connectivity of the Nintendo Wii and Sony's Playstation 3.
• Two-thirds of all men in television households between ages 18-34 have access to a video game console in their homes.
• During the fourth quarter of 2006, gamers in the top quintile (the top 20% of users based on average use over the quarter which stands at 5 hours, 45 minutes) accounted for 74.4% of total console usage.
• In the fourth quarter of 2006, 93.8 million people used a video game console at least once for a minute or more. Moreover, in any given minute of the day, about 1.6 million people in the U.S. are using a video game console.

Jeff Hermann, VP of Nielsen Wireless and Interactive Services said, "The video game console has become a major player in the battle for the living room." According to him, the consoles are competing against each other to draw the most playing time out of households across the country, including movies, multimedia and Internet TV.