Playstation 2 beats all other consoles in minutes played

Given all the hype surrounding the Wii, it comes across as somewhat surprising that the Sony Playstation 2 would have clocked 30.2 % of all minutes played on a video gaming console in 2008. Nielsen Media Research group has tabulated relevant data from January to October 2008.

Then again there are 140 million PS2s being used out there. Obviously people are still playing this system from the previous gaming generation. It suggest that the long tail effect is substantial in the gaming industry with Sony's footprint from sales of Playstation 2 persisting.

Xbox 360 (18%) does somewhat better than the Wii (13%) possibly attributable to the longer and more intense nature of games that tend to be played on the Xbox 360.

What must be particularly worrying to Sony is that the Playstation 3 comes in at 5th position, even after the XBox.

In another interesting statistic, World of Warcraft users average 671 minutes (over 11 hours) every week. At any given moment, about 0.72% of all PC users are logged into the highly addictive game.