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PS2 crushes Wii, Xbox in gaming minutes

More video game consoles equals more minutes played. The massive footprint of Sony's PlayStation 2 makes it the king of the hill in usage for 2008.

Dave Rosenberg Co-founder, MuleSource
Dave Rosenberg has more than 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to startup IPOs to open-source and cloud software companies. He is CEO and founder of Nodeable, co-founder of MuleSoft, and managing director for Hardy Way. He is an adviser to DataStax, IT Database, and Puppet Labs.
Dave Rosenberg

The PlayStation 2 received 30.2 percent of all console-gaming minutes in 2008 (January to October), according to the Nielsen Media Research.

Generic PS2
Sony

That statistic is a bit surprising, until you consider that Sony has sold more than 140 million PS2s since its launch. With the largest footprint, the PS2 should have the largest usage base.

    Top Console Usage (by percent of minutes played)
  • PlayStation 2 (30.2 percent)
  • Xbox 360 (18.3 percent)
  • Wii (13.5 percent)
  • Xbox (9.1 percent)
  • PlayStation 3 (7.7 percent)
  • GameCube (4.4 percent)
  • Other (16.9 percent)

Admittedly, these PS2 numbers are surprising and very impressive. The PS3 is still struggling against the Wii and Xbox, and this data certainly doesn't let the PS3 off the hook, but it does show that there might be a long-tail effect in place for console games.

Even more impressive data from Nielsen is the fact that World of Warcraft, or WoW, players average 671 minutes (more than 11 hours) per week. In any given minute, "almost 1 percent (0.723 percent) of all PC gamers are playing WoW."