Over 50 million consoles sold, but people aren’t playing the Nintendo Wii

Despite being one of the most successful consoles of all time and selling over 50 million units, the Nintendo Wii is barely used by consumers and suffers dramatically in comparison to its rivals, according to a new Nielsen report.

The Nielsen Company has just released the update to its quarterly ‘State of the Video Gamer’ report and quite surprisingly it has outlined that the current highest selling console in the market, Nintendo’s Wii, records the lowest results in terms of daily average number of sessions, average usage days and active user percent.

The Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 lead the charge when it comes to the most used console, even the last generation Playstation 2 and Xbox are reported to be used more often by consumers than Nintendo’s heralded gaming console.

According to Nielsen, the predominant user of the Wii is likely to use the console at most once a week, for fewer minutes and the fewest number of sessions compared to the other groups of consoles.

The report is formulated in the US after Nielsen analyse data from its National People Meter sample of more than 17,000 television households. When metering households, Nielsen doesn’t just monitor television activity, but any device attached to the television. When the device (in this case, video game console) is detected, Nielsen collects and processes the usage and demographic data.

The report also found that despite a growing trend in older gamers, the most active users of the majority of consoles are in fact under the age of 17. The most active users of the Nintendo Wii are people in the age group 6 to 11, people aged 12 to 17 for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 bucks the trend with an average active user of 25 to 34 years of age.

This report has highlighted some very interesting trends in the video game industry and some quite alarming statistics for the Nintendo Wii, evidently the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 have a lot more longevity when it comes to software titles. Will Nintendo’s focus on casual gaming hurt the manufacturer in the long run?