As I sit here enjoying my third cup of coffee, looking out the window at the water flowing down my street, it makes me wonder if the rain is ever going to stop (it also makes me wonder why I ever left California, but that is a topic for another day). Over the beautiful Labor Day weekend, I took a trip with my family to visit friends in Westport, Connecticut, where the impact of Irene was very much evident in the fallen trees and power lines that remained six days after the storm passed through there. When we showed up at their door Saturday afternoon, our friends’ power had just been restored that morning. My friends were lucky – they had a generator that provided some power to their home, which allowed them to host another family who was without power in the days following the storm. Read more »
As you may know from some of my previous posts, I have four sons who love to play video games. Whether I hear explosion blasts blaring from my living room speakers from a heated game of “Call of Duty: Black Ops,” or see one of my sons drop to their knees after defeat in a close tennis match of “Wii: Sports,” I’m quite familiar with the sights and sounds of console, PC, and portable device gaming. Other methods of gaming are certainly starting to gain favor in my house, and while traditional devices still reign supreme, there are instances where I take note of the growing use of these other devices. Read more »
People are playing videogames in more ways now than ever before, and the task of understanding gamers and their needs is a challenging one. From the mobile gamer who enjoys a quick game of Angry Birds to the PC gamer who logs hours of World of Warcraft a day, the gaming population has never been more diverse than now.
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I was talking with one of my younger colleagues recently about what I was getting my kids for Easter when he abruptly stopped me.
“Wait, you get your kids presents for Easter?” He shook his head and continued, “Aside from some candy, I never got anything for Easter! Presents? C’mon!”
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One of my colleagues puts it the best: “In terms of the games industry, NPD might as well be spelled POS.” We are very well known for, if not infamous for, our monthly reporting of new physical retail sales of hardware, software (aka, games) and accessories. What we’re not as well known for in the games industry is our extensive consumer research capabilities. We utilize our online panel of nearly 2 million consumers to conduct a wide array of surveys to cover industries where we don’t have a point-of-sale service or to conduct custom research, offer trackers and monitors that cover areas such as content acquisition and device ownership, or to provide a topical report on a particular area of interest, like our upcoming topical on Online Gaming. We have tapped these consumer research capabilities to launch our newest service, Games Industry: Total Consumer Spend.
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Like many parents, I marvel about how much life has changed since I was a kid. Take my son Alex, as one example. Alex is 13, and in many ways he’s a lot like I was when I was his age. While he fantasizes about one day playing in the NBA (despite his 4′ 11″ height), I wanted to be Pat Benatar or Chrissie Hynde. While his taste in music revolves around rap and hip hop, my affinity for disco eventually gave way to alternative rock. At 13 we were both math geeks and loved hanging with our friends. The differences? Alex has a lot more - and in some cases a lot cooler - options for indulging his interests than I did. While there was no “Camp Rock” when I was 13, last summer Alex had the privilege of attending the LeBron James basketball camp and got to meet LeBron himself. And while I met my girlfriends at the mall to hang out, or went to afternoon matinees at the movie theater, a big part of Alex’s social time takes place online, playing games via Xbox Live with his friends or socializing on Facebook.
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Are parents more likely to purchase a DVD or a book for their child? If they’re going to buy a DVD, will they be more inclined to make the purchase at Walmart or Toys R Us? When they’re making their purchasing decision, which will grab their attention more, Toy Story or SpongeBob SquarePants? Which retailer is capturing more than its fair share of spending against a particular hot brand or license? Insight into these questions, addressed with concrete data, is now available with The NPD Group’s Kids Industry Data Service (KIDS) / Cross-Category Service.
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I’ve recently gotten completely hooked on Dance Central for a variety of reasons. It could be the fact that I’m still in awe of how well the Kinect for Xbox 360 tracks my every movement, or that I can routinely beat any of my four sons in the “Dance Battle” mode (ok, maybe not “routinely”, but you get the picture…). What it all boils down to, however, is the fact that I like to dance, and I like music. So when I’d worked through most of the 32-track playlist that comes with Dance Central, I realized it was time to add some new tracks from the Xbox Live Marketplace. Soon after going with “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas, I was exercising my inner-Fergie.
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Well, it seems that the holiday season is in full swing. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but the sounds of the holidays are around us everywhere in television ads, Internet gimmicks (”Have you elf’d yourself yet?”) and if you’re a Gleek like me, you soaked up every minute of this week’s holiday-themed episode. One of my favorite Christmas songs from my youth was “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” Well, with three weeks of open-ended responses in from our KIDS tracker, I can tell you that “teeth” is one of the few things that has yet to show up even once on kids’ wish list items.
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On a recent business trip to San Francisco, I had an hour to kill in between meetings so I popped into one of my favorite haunts, Williams Sonoma, to see what was new in the culinary goods world with the approaching holidays.
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Consumer Technology, Entertainment, Software, Video Games | Anita Frazier, Entertainment Industry Analyst Toys & Video Games | 
September 12, 2011 12:39 pm | 
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