PS3 Owners Buy The Most Movie Games, says Nielsen

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.