New survey of game popularity rewards LittleBigPlanet
- Posted December 18th, 2008 at 05:44 EDT by
- 7 Comments
Tired of eye-grabbing sales figures headlines or never-ending top ten listings? You're not the only one. Networked Insights, a self-described "Web 2.0 company" based in Madison, WI, has come forward with a novel new method of determining a game's popularity based on the amount of online activity it generates.
The idea is to help marketing people get a sense of how their audiences are reacting to a game which simple sales figures can't provide, and to account for the discrepancies that often arise between how much a game sells and how frequently it comes up as a topic online.
Networked Insights has published a report comparing its own findings using this method for October in the U.S. with those of the much-cited NPD sales research group. Here's a brief breakdown of the methodology:
"To gather data for this Measuring the Social report, Networked Insights tapped more than 17,000 social media and social networking sites, which included 3.5 million conversation per day and over 120 million unique users, and analyzed all interactions and post content around songs. The following data includes all the various types of interactions available to online audiences, including reading, listening, rating, sharing, linking and inviting. Networked Insights can also determine the value and influence of each interaction – for example, Tiger Woods sharing a golf video carries far more weight than an everyday golf enthusiast taking the same action."
The Networked Insights list starkly contradicts that of the NPD. LittleBigPlanet, for instance, brought in a respectable but far from chart-topping 215,000 unit sales during October according to NPD data, putting it in eighth place behind evergreen Nintendo hits like Wii Play. According to Networked Insights' criteria, however, LittleBigPlanet came third behind Fable II and Fallout 3 with a gargantuan 6,249,040 online interactions during the same month.
Nintendo's achievements, by contrast, diminished sharply when considered this way. While three Wii titles made it into the NPD October top ten, Networked Insights' list retained only one - Wii Play - in tenth place, suggesting that most of Nintendo's consumers couldn't give two hoots for the online gaming community.
If any of our readers work in marketing, now's the time to give us the benefit of your opinion.
Email
Related Content
Comments
-
-
Merovingian
- 2:41am EST - December 18th, 2008
- 2
As I do (work/study Marketing), I'll share my opinion with you guys. Well, this only proves something that most of you already know intuitively and which I have previously said on another post. Wii fans (read install base) are mostly made of casual gamers, those who do not participate on forums, blogs and big sites message boards. People who do that own a PS3, a x360 or a powerful PC, those I like to call Real Gamers. The Real Gamers who own a Wii most likely own it as a secondary console and already have a PS a PS3, a x360 or a powerful PC.
In the Video Game market, sales numbers are undoubtly an excelente tool to determine what consumers want and expect from Software and Hardware developers. Networked Insights' list helps to track down players behavior (who participate more frequently of especialized internet site contents? what's the type of discussion they are like to involve and comment?) and only that. "Eventhough LBP didn't sell much, real players discuss a lot about it." and that's it. -
supamariobrotha
- 2:55am EST - December 18th, 2008
- 3
i like this better than the top 10 list and stuff
-
-
GamingGumper
- 5:39am EST - December 18th, 2008
- 5
OK here is the problem I have always had with correlating sales to "interest". I consider myself pretty firmly lower middle class. I have great "interest" in many games but very little purchasing power. Most of the titles I play are rentals through Gamefly or second hand through trading services. While I appreciate that these don't benefit the studios directly, someone has to purchase the title in the first place. There really needs to be more emphasis placed on what gamers "want" to play versus "what they can afford to buy".
There are close to a dozen titles that peak my interest this season but other than LBP, which I have purchased, most will not be bought by me but I intended to play them none the less.
-
-
This will permanently ban this user and delete all associated comments. This action is irreversible, are you SURE you want to do this?!
