I’d be interested to see how Nielsen’s past data stacks up to known video game sales numbers. If their estimates are pretty close to the actual results this could be a very powerful investing tool. Full press release below.
Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) and The Nielsen Company, the two leading providers of video game data collection and analysis, today announced a new data integration initiative to deliver unprecedented insight into the video games industry.
In the deal, data from the Nielsen Video Game Tracking service will be integrated into GamePulse™, EEDAR’s market leading web based dash-boarding and on-demand research application. This enhanced service will enable licensed clients of both the Nielsen Video Game Tracking and GamePulse services to view consumer awareness, purchase intent and demographic information for upcoming and historical games directly within GamePulse.
Nielsen Video Game Tracking is a weekly survey of more than 1,200 active gamers collecting consumer data on awareness, purchase interest and other key metrics for upcoming video game titles as well as recently released titles. It is the longest operating study available, with more than four years of data collected on console, PC and handheld titles. Through integration with EEDAR’s GamePulse application, the tracking data will be merged with marketing spend (Nielsen Monitor Plus data), review score and performance information alongside EEDAR’s proprietary dataset containing more than 12 million facts on over 10,000 video games.
“It is incredibly important to the long term health of the video game industry that, where commercially feasible, competition be replaced with collaboration”, said EEDAR Chairman Greg Short. “By allowing our clients – the world’s leading publishers, developers, creative agencies and financial groups – to access and integrate historically competitive data-sets into EEDAR’s industry leading GamePulse service, we dramatically increase the value of each discrete source by providing contextual cross-data insights via a highly accessible and intuitive interface.”
“We are excited to partner with EEDAR on this initiative” said Mike Flamberg, Director of Client Consulting at Nielsen, “but more importantly, I think our clients are the real winners. The integration of Nielsen’s unparalleled consumer metrics from Video Game Tracking within EEDAR’s GamePulse will further enable our clients to make disciplined, data driven decisions. This level of rigor and objectivity is becoming invaluable in this increasingly high stakes industry.”
The integration will be available to concurrent subscribers of the Nielsen Video Game Tracking and EEDAR GamePulse services by March, 2010.
-Justin
