IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

PS3 Owners Buy The Most Movie Games, says Nielsen

Posted December 17, 2009 by James Brightman

With a few rare exceptions, video games based on movies are either mediocre or downright awful. Publishers keep making these games, however, because the tie-in to a hit movie can be a great cross-promotional product and there are consumers out there who will apparently buy anything. Nielsen recently looked at its Homescan consumer panel that purchased at least one movie-based game over the past two years to get a better idea of who's buying these titles. 

Not too surprisingly, households with kids seem to be buying these movie tie-ins more than others. "Most notably from a demographic standpoint, households that purchased a movie-based video game skewed strongly towards families with kids, even when compared to the average video game buying household. In particular, households with kids ages 6-12 represent the 'sweet spot' for these products by over indexing the highest for having made a movie-based video game purchase," Nielsen stated, adding, "Movie-game buying households also tend to be more affluent, with incomes of $70K or higher. And non-Caucasian households, particularly Hispanic and Asian, over indexed the most among ethnicities for movie-game purchases compared to average video game buying households."

Nielsen also found that PlayStation platforms dominate households buying movie-based games. "...we find that households purchasing a movie-based game spend a larger proportion of their console video game expenditures on PlayStation platforms than the average video game buying households. PlayStation 3 in particular over indexes the most for this group," Nielsen noted. "In terms of retail outlets, these consumers are slightly more likely to purchase a video game at a video game specialty store when compared to the average game buying household."

Finally, Nielsen also commented that consumers of movie-based games are more likely to purchase more DVD movies. While 67% of  all U.S. households purchased a DVD in the past two years, this percentage increases to 84.6% among households that bought a video game during the last couple years, and it rises way up to 91.7% when looking at households that bought a movie-based video game.

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.