It’s been several weeks now since Nintendo released the Wii’s Nintendo Channel, bringing with it the promise of publicly available console usage statistics. With a few weeks to mature, the service is now a varied, fascinating labyrinth of numbers that’s easy to lose hours in; and when you resurface, you come up with some strong insight into how a large subset of Wii owners use their machines.



For this feature we scoured the Nintendo Channel, aggregating every scrap of data there was to see. But before the findings are analyzed, it’s important to understand what this data is and, more importantly, what it is not:

It’s not a representative sample: To have their usage tracked by Nintendo, a Wii owner has to connect the console to the internet, download the Nintendo Channel, and opt in to the tracking program. This implies that the average tracked Wii user has a certain basic level of technical savvy and trust of Nintendo; these traits do not necessarily (and almost certainly don’t) stretch to encompass all Wii owners. The sort of person who wouldn’t opt into a tracking program may have a different usage pattern than the sort of person who would.

But it is a large sample: Nintendo has not revealed how many people have opted in to the usage tracking program, nor does it officially reveal with its statistics the number of people that have played any given game. But it is possible to use simple division on the statistics provided to come up with an estimate for these numbers. Nintendo has provided the stats for Mii Channel usage, and it’s probably safe to assume that most people who have opted in to the program have also used that channel (it comes on every Wii). Thus, we can conclude that our calculation of total Mii Channel users – about 896,000 – is probably only slightly lower than the overall total of users who are tracked. But even if it is just 896,000, that’s about 8.8% of the total US Wii installed based (according to NPD’s May 2008 total of 10.2 million). In the world of market research, 8.8% is a pretty big slice of the pie.

It’s cherry picked: Not every game ever released for the Wii is represented on the Nintendo Channel, and out of those that are even fewer have published statistics. At the time our research was conducted, the Nintendo Channel database contained 336 products (not including unreleased games). Of these, only 118 or about 36% of the products had associated usage data. Given that not all of the statistics showed product success it’s not entirely clear why some information is there while other information is absent. That it’s not all there however speaks to the fact that some sort of methodology is used to decide what we can and cannot see. This methodology could skew the picture the data provides.

It’s a snapshot: Usage stats on the Nintendo Channel change all the time as tracking goes on and games are added to the database. The data used to create this feature was all taken from the same 24-hour period during the first week of July 2008.

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