Second Life pwns Gordon Freeman, Warhammer Online, others

Tatero, posture all you want about it, but just over 3% of 180K homes = just shy of 6K homes playing. Whoop de doo. Suggesting that SL pwns WoW with 6k vs almost 100k homes playing is poor work and focusing in on the stat that appears to best support the game you enjoy.

If you wanted to do something interesting with this headline, you would have spent 20 minutes researching why SL players spend over an hour more in-game on the average each week. You could have written something really nice about how SL draws people in and keeps them once they find it; about the community of people in SL that help cement the notion that you are a part of something.

Instead you tried to fist-pump and shout "We're #1!!!!!" which was amateurish in terms of 'reporting' here, and also anything but the truth. SL is a niche product with small relevance against the larger market.

BTW, statistics that win: Your missing 'other' mmo's didn't make the cut because the average amount of time played was lower than those in the top 10. Simple math. They may have far more folks playing than SL (Runescape anyone?) but those folks don't stay connected for as long each week.

Which would, again, have been an interesting note in an article about the meaningful data in that chart and how SL bonds a smaller community much more tightly than the overwhelmingly larger number of games that have more subscribers but shorter play times.

Try harder next time?

Considering how SL's first-hour learning curve is generally considered more challenging than most games, AND the fact that SL is *not* a game but a platform (which is tough for a lot of people to wrap their heads around), I for one am pleasantly surprised to see such a high percentage of "average households" using SL.

WoW is of course the giant, but let's factor the in-world economy into things too. I doubt anyone is earning a living playing WoW. On the other hand, I know of several content creators in SL who are earning very healthy real-world incomes from the "game" that is SL.

"Top 10 PC Games"....... By calling 200,000 random homes and asking what game they play? Not so much.

what i want to know is, HL2? which half-life 2? Are they counting episodes 1&2 as well? All the games that use a executable called "hl2.exe" (that's like 9 games)?
If it's a survey, some people could be grouping them together...

Depending on how they recorded the information, some of the stats are a little strange.

AH - Update, 11:50am: Writing in Comments, Nielsen's Brad Raczka says this data is not from consumer surveys where they estimate gameplay times, but actual play: "Just wanted to let you know that this data is from actual metered gameplay measurement... It is not survey data. We electronically meter the web and application activity from 180,000+ homes in the U.S." In an email exchange, he adds: "Keep in mind the Nielsen Online panel is not a panel of gamers, rather a panel of U.S. homes all over from which we track web and gaming activity."

There we go then - as far as I know, they would have no way to detect WHICH game using "hl2.exe" launched...which means that stat is actually

Team fortress 2
HL2
HL2 episode 1
HL2 episode 2
Portal
HL1 Source
...Counterstrike Source, possibly?

The problem with statistics (as any honest statistician will tell you) is that they don't automatically scale well, and the context under which the numbers are acquired can make a significant difference in the results you get.

On scale:

There's the obvious example which is often abused in TV commercials. You survey 10 people in New York. Four of them think cats are evil beings from Dimension X. The rest think cats are regular animals.

The way certain lazy media and corporate interests run with statistics, you could see headlines like "40% of New Yorkers Surveyed Think Cats Are Demons!" or a catfood commericial claiming "Cat Treatz! Now With Brimstone! Because Almost _Half_ of Our Customer Base* Wanted It!".

(* tiny footnote fine print -- "half of customers surveyed")

Sure, 181,000+ homes surveyed is a lot more than 10 people -- but the same problem of scaling applies. Just because something is true at a lesser level does not automatically mean it's also true on wider scale.

Survey statistics are good for discovering tendencies, or trends worth keeping an eye on, but they are not naturally or automatically predictive, or indicative of anything.

The second problem also comes into play -- under what context are the statistics gathered? Who is responding?

Different areas have different "micro-cultures" reflective of the people who live there. Survey one of my old neighborhoods about music and you'd probably get a surprisingly high number of people who liked some form of punk or metal.

Survey a different neighborhood I knew? Salsa music.

I'm not saying the collected statistics are innacurate, only that they may reflect the tastes of the 181K people surveyed very well, but that those results probably don't reflect well beyone the age and social demographic of the particular people surveyed.

As statisticians have said, you even have to factor in that your survey results can only reflect that portion of the population who will _participate_ in surveys.

So, the numbers may be a fair representation of the specific people surveyed, but to try to draw larger conclusions from the numbers would not be advisable.

I play both WoW and SL (not as much as I used too, but still log in from time to time) and I think it's cool they are both are the list. It is odd how some of the biggest selling games (Sims 2, Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings Online, etc.) are not listed, but then again it really depends on the area where they did this. Well, it's till a neat article and thank you for sharing it with us.

The Messiah of Mount and Magic number's really do surprise me. It just seems incredibly unlikely that it would garner that many people and playtime with it's meager sales figures.