The Nielsen Company
has released its year-end findings on the top consumer trends among Americans in 2007, spanning everything from music downloads and TV programs to ring tones and consumer purchasing trends, and revealed that, among its top ten trends in console and video gaming, that
World of Warcraft is the top PC title, and PlayStation 2 the top gaming console.
The lists, ranked by average user playing per minute, revealed that the average
WoW user plays for 1023 minutes per week, with the number of users outpacing the rest of the list by nearly seven times. Users of the second-place title,
The Sims, play for 298 minutes per week. The third-place title is Jagex's
RuneScape, whose users play for 688 minutes per week.
According to Nielsen, 42.2 percent of all time spent playing consoles is allotted to the PlayStation 2, putting it in the decisive lead among consoles. The original Xbox, in second place, receives about 13.9 percent of gamers' console time, while third-placer Xbox 360 receives 11.8 percent of the usage minutes.
The trend of previous-generation consoles receiving a larger share of gamer time continues, with the GameCube outranking the Wii in fourth and fifth respectively, and the PlayStation 3 coming in last among the named console, though an "Other" category receives 17.1 percent of the usage minutes, encompassing "any other console systems found in the home."
