SubscribeNielsen’s Attempt at Game Metrics
July 19, 2007 9:20 am
Via a colleague at NCsoft, Nielsen is yet again trying to get into game demographics to sell to marketers. They’ve tried this before, but failed. The old plan, in addition to the antiquated diaries they already use for television :
Nielsen intends to roll out two products this year, the more formidable one being a “tag” that PC, console, and online game developers can build into their software to be used by Nielsen to measure all sorts of in-game activity, especially response to advertising. This includes how people navigate through games, what levels they reach, and how long they spend on each level.
But, because tag placement requires the participation of game developers, Nielsen doesn’t expect the first tagged game to be released until the second half of 2005.
I suspect this also failed because the developers didn’t give a shit about “[measuring] all sorts of in-game activity.”
The new plan is a People Meter-style “audio scanning device.” I didn’t know how People Meters work, the devices they use to track television habits outside of the diaries, and Wikipedia’s article sucks, so I Googled it. Here’s a description of a portable one.
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.
I am not making this up, and Nielsen is planning to do the same thing with games: “the equipment detects each game’s unique ‘audio signature,’ compares it to the reference library of audio signatures compiled by Nielsen, and determines what games are being played when and where.”
Alrighty then!
They’re also getting data from Sony, which is much less bizarre: “which Sony games are being played, by whom, and for how long — ‘to enhance the data we are collecting and to give us the opportunity to take a hybrid-based approach to measurement.’”
They’re not specific, but I imagine they’re talking PS3 data. I’ve curious about how seriously Sony and Microsoft are taking their mountains of free data from online consoles — really, the Xbox 360 knows everything I play, for how long, what I do in game, when I log out, what TV and movies I watch, which DVDs I purchase. One would like to think that they’re using it to make the games better, instead of selling it to marketers so we might one day enjoy the wonders of dynamic advertising in everything we play, but hey.
Rahul wrote:
I imagine that Valve has been able to learn a great deal about game design from the information they gleamed about Half Life 2 through Steam. In fact, they often comment on how much they learned and what kind of changes they made in Episode 1 (i.e. that most player never made it to the end, so episodic content actually benefits the game in that sense because each episode is shorter and therefore the chance of a player getting to the end is higher). Similarly, World of Warcraft probably teaches Blizzard a ton of lessons about which direction to go in next — even if those lessons aren’t necessarily good game design decisions, as witnessed by how much WoW is starting to lean towards high level epic hardcore player content. And what about the Wii? The system reports to you how much time you spent playing a given game or using a given channel and at what times of the day. I’m sure Nintendo’s working on some kind of extension to that setup to allow Wiis worldwide to share that information with the company.
Posted on 19-Jul-07 at 1:36 pm | Permalink
Sara Jensen Schubert wrote:
Valve is the only single-player developer I see talking about their metrics. And to the best of my knowledge, the only MMO companies that’ve invested heavily in metrics are Turbine and Flying Lab — not Blizzard.
Posted on 19-Jul-07 at 3:15 pm | Permalink
NateE wrote:
I wonder how long until we start seeing PPM devices integrated into cellphones, using the microphone when the phone is idle.
This quickly building glut of in-game advertising is starting to worry me. On one hand, some ads can add a certain authenticity to a game world if it is context appropriate (Coke ads in GTA for example) and not overloaded. While I believe we will tend to see context-appropriate ads, I don’t have much faith in them being tastefully distributed through a game world.
Of course then there is the whole argument “I just paid X dollars for a game, not to be advertised to!” which I very much agree with.
It waits to be seen if the rush of advertisers and the willingness of game companies to prostitute their metrics to the highest bidder will negatively impact the players and, by extension, the industry.
Posted on 19-Jul-07 at 3:43 pm | Permalink
Rahul wrote:
Well, I don’t expect Blizzard to discuss metrics very much since WoW is a very closed system. But I can’t imagine them having such an easy-to-mine network of free data and not doing anything with it. Surely they have some mechanisms in place that they use to some extent for some purpose that we aren’t seeing from the outside (which could even be their intention — the best improvements come naturally).
For example, they must have a way to know the extent of a change in damage dealt by a given weapon when they roll out a new patch, so that they can change its effect. They’ve also mentioned numerous times that they can see how difficult or how challenging certain boss encounters are and change the encounter in response to that.
The only problem I have with Blizzard is that they only seem to talk about those metrics, and not about things like, for instance, how many players play the game without ever communicating with another player. This is very interesting data that they surely have recorded somewhere.
Posted on 20-Jul-07 at 2:55 am | Permalink
NateE wrote:
I would suspect we will never see metrics from Blizzard. I’m sure they are recording much of the information discussed above, but they know they sit on the single largest collection of player metrics currently. While it would be amazing if they did share their metrics, they also know full well the power that is held in that information and probably will release it only if and when they take everything they can from it.
Posted on 20-Jul-07 at 8:46 am | Permalink
Stropp’s World - A Blog about World of Warcraft, MMORPGs, and Games. WoW! » Blog Archive » Fine Reads - 20th July wrote:
[…] We Can Fix That With Data has some news and commentary on Nielsen’s Attempt at Game Metrics. If they track my dagger wielding Rogue activities, will they try and sell me a Ginsu knife sets? […]
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