rc5583

Actually, I have to correct myself and take back those percentages. The TMP field is not the percentage of households that were playing any game, they are the percentage of minutes spent in any game from the top 100.

WoW: 46%
Second Life: 3%
Other MMO's: < 1.6%

Or, in English, for every 100 minutes these households played games, 46 of them were spent in WoW, just over 3 of them were spent in SL, and less than 1 minute and 36 seconds were spent in any other MMO (which is why they aren't on this list).

We don't even know how many homes played any one game. What we do know is that Second Life users spend more time in game (or platform to be nice) than any other games users, but they add up just over 3% of all game time played. This infers a very small population that really likes SL.

WoW coming in second with average minutes played, and first in TMP tells us that a much larger group of people play this game, and also stay in the game a good amount of time. This infers a wide population that really likes WoW.

Or, in a nutshell: SL is still a very small environment that has great sticky factor for the niche audience that enjoys it.

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?

This is less impressive with a little reading comprehension. 3.206% of the folks who were tracked by Nielsen played Second Life. Their average minutes per week played were 760.

46.710% of the folks tracked played WoW for an average of 653 minutes.

So, what this tells us is that Second Life has a very small audience who plays over 12 hours a week.

Which is not all that exciting or newsworthy. Someone rushed to make a bigger headline here than they should have. Pwnage? No. Fanboi looking hard to find a headline for their game? Yes.