08 July,2009 10:00 AM IST | | Balaji Narasimhan
Nielsen report says that people are spending more hours playing
One of my bosses had once asked me, "Who is your competition?" I naively responded that it was limited to just journalists who cover technology, whereupon this gentleman raised his eyebrows in proper George Raft fashion and said that if my readers preferred to watch a saas-bahu serial instead of reading my articles, then that was my competition.
A report from Nielsen shows how true this can be. Though it is a foreign report, some of what it says are applicable to India too because we too are in the midst of a recession. This report says that an analysis of data from over 200,000 gamers indicates a rise in claimed hours of game play since 2007 and a fall in DVDs.
Figures speak up
A look at the figures for January of every year from 2006 to 2009 will make this clear. According to Nielsen, in 2006, this stood at 14.5 hours of game play per week. This figure, which stood at around 16.5 hours per week for both 2007 and 2008, shot up to almost 19 hours per week in 2009.
Nielsen could have left it at that, but they did a more thorough research on entertainment as a whole and found that DVD sales in units were flat for the first half of 2008 and declined by double digits in the second half of the year as the recession deepened.
In fact, if we look at Nielsen's data the average number of DVDs purchased in January for 2006 tou00a02009, we find that this was almost seven in 2007, but fell to just above six for 2008 and 2009.Worse still, this figure has been falling since March 2009 and for May 2009, this figure has plummeted below six.
Why?
One reason why games are picking up could be because of the fact that they provide a constant source of entertainment in a recession year, when luxury gives way to essentials. While you can watch a rented or a purchased DVD only a few times, the reusability factor is much higher for games, which can be played again and again.
Matt Peckham, writing in a blog on pcworld.com puts it crisply when he says, "You can drop $10-$15 on a movie ticket, a watered-down drink, and a bag of oily, over-salted popcorn for a couple hours of generally trite escapism, or direct that fifteen bucks toward something that'll keep you occupied for dozens [of hours]."
If this happens in India, then movie producers should start getting really afraid.
QUICK TAKE
>>Study says that gaming hours are increasing
>>But sales of DVDs have dropped
>>Games are preferred because they can be played again and again
The first game?
One of the first computer games was developed in 1961, when MIT students Martin Graetz and Alan Kotok, with MIT employee Steve Russell, developed Spacewar! on a PDP-1 computer used for statistical calculations.
Source: Wikipedia
