Two things caught my eye today: The Times is claiming that online gaming is commanding more attention than US prime time television. Easier to do these days than in TV's heyday of the early 80s/90s, and the comparison is between Counter-Strike and NCIS (wtf if that?), but still:
The most popular online action game franchise, Counter-Strike, achieved 7.6 billion viewer-minutes in the past month, according to the specialist researcher Gameasure.
The finding puts the game — in which online players team up to tackle terrorists in a sprawling virtual world — far ahead of the most-watched broadcast TV show in America last week, the CBS drama NCIS, which notched up an estimated 4.2 billion viewer-minutes over the same period.
Now that's bloody interesting: games, nor telly, were really ever measured using 'viewer-minutes' much: TV tends to work in total viewers over the hour or half-hour of the standard show, and games tend to have metrics such as total subscribers, or hours-per-week in the case of MMOs.
Next: Toyota's the latest in a line of big brands to spend their promotional cash on an advergame:
The shooting car is the central character of a new Xbox game called Yaris that Toyota will introduce today. The game will be offered free to all Xbox 360 console owners in the United States and Canada, who can download it from Xbox Live’s service. It is also the first Xbox game created by an advertiser to be distributed over Xbox Live.
Like scores of other consumer brand companies, Toyota is increasingly creating its own content like video games rather than relying simply on advertising during commercial breaks.
Advergaming ain't new, of course, but with the neatness of XBox Marketplace, delivering them direct to a hungry audience is much easier these days.
I think Valve are conveniently using numbers that set them apart here. They did this before several years back, when they compare their data to the number of people playing Friends.
Hardcore players will play for more than 60 minutes, so 'viewer (times) minutes' can easily be greater, since there's no cap on the length a person might be playing a game, whereas 30/60 minutes is the natural cap on a TV show.
You want to compare a game's viewer minutes with the total number of shows' viewer minutes played in that same time period.
Posted by: Joost Schuur | October 10, 2007 at 03:20
That's a good point, that television shows are capped, and gaming isn't.
But then again, from an advertiser's point of view, a captive, attentive audience is what they're after.. so if games can keep attention for a long time, that can only be a good thing in their eyes.
Posted by: Alice | October 10, 2007 at 12:46
This is a dynamite stat for the traditional forms of media like TV commercial production and worrying for traditional content production but will people just watch TV, play games, IM, email etc at the sametime? Read a stat recently that said more technology in the home, the more TV was watched or just left on in the background? When the (appropriate demo) brands realise this amazing fact, as Toyota is beginning to, it's going to be fascinating to witness how it's going effect my industry (traditional commercial production and yr sis). Why in the UK are we making traditional commercials more than ever? Will all these different fragmented channels survive? Visiting a commercial TV channel who are top of the long tail of digital TV in UK they claim the fragmented audiences are coming back to the established branded trusted channels and deserting the new niche digital channels. I don't know who to believe now but the meshing of games, branding and some form of usefulness or entertainment is clearly the way forward. Interactive and not passive anymore.
Posted by: Damiano Vukotic | October 13, 2007 at 11:07
Read this Alice
http://simonandrews.typepad.com/big_picture/2007/10/free-games.html
Posted by: Damiano Vukotic | October 13, 2007 at 11:46