Video Game Nielson Ratings
The Associated Press is reporting that Nielsen Media Research has announced that they will provide a rating service to track the popularity of video games. This rating will be similar to the one currently used to rate the most popular television shows. The data will be collected from the same 10,000 households that are used for Nielsen's current television ratings.
This new data will be available to advertisers and video game makers who subscribe to the Nielsen service. Reportedly, subscribers will recieve ratings reports that rank the most popular video games as well as information about the platform and genre of the game.
The game list is still in flux. However, the target seems to be the set of new gaming consoles, including the XBox 360, the Playstation 3 and the Wii. Since the data will be collected from the same households that provide the TV data, I am guessing that this service will monitor traditional as well as online game offerings - which should make the subscribers very happy!
Nielsen is aggressively expanding it's monitoring avenues. In this article from June of this year (2006), they have also announced plans to monitor iPod, streaming video and cell phone video viewing.
Who would have thought that 'Big Brother' would not come from the government, but from a television rating service?
