Neilsen Introduces New Way To Measure Gamer Metrics 27
GameDaily reports on a couple of new ways that Neilsen is trying to stay with the times. Game usage and tracking have always been hard for them, and they're rolling out two new strategies to consumers. The first requires participation on the part of developers: a 'tag' that can be built into software to register usage with the Neilsen folks. An initial attempt at this was tried in 2005, and never got off the ground. They're now trying again. The other is a bit more clever, and is usable on multiple forms of entertainment. The blog 'We Can Fix That with Data' did some research into the organization's 'Portable People Meters': "The Portable People Meter, developed by Arbitron Inc., is a pager-sized device that is carried by a representative panel of television viewers. It automatically detects inaudible codes that broadcasters embed in the audio portion of their programming using encoders provided by BBM and Arbitron. At the end of each day, the survey participants place the meters into base stations that recharge the devices and send the collected codes to BBM for tabulation. The Portable People Meter can measure exposure to any electronic media, which has audio that can be encoded - television, cable, and radio, even cinema advertising and in-store media."
Re:What about TV (Score:3, Interesting)
Their new technology (referenced in the article as "PeopleMeter") allows them to passively monitor all the audible marks that you hear during the day. They listen for encoded signals in the audible streams of radio stations, television stations, retail outlets and (now) video games. This lets them count how many eyes (or ears, as it were) are on a specific media stream at a given time which, in turn, sets the "demand" for the advertising market. World of Warcraft will be going up against Howard Stern and Boston Legal.
I'll leave it at that; but I'm sure the hackers in us all are VERY curious as to how this encoding works... no? :->
Re:What about TV (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, there are already services out there that allow gamers to "share" what games they are playing in real time (i.e. "User Satanicpuppy is currently playing: Galactic Civilizations II"), so their online gamer friends can keep up with what they're doing...It's almost trivial in implementation...Just run a small client to occasionally check running applications for known games. Such a service could easily grab usage information from their user base to generate stats.
Neilsen is just a fossil at this point; their information gathering is second rate compared to what's publicly available now. They would say that their demographic information is better and that they have the ability to generate a more representative sample set, but this could be overcome through the use of a much wider sample set, something these other services are more capable of getting.