We normally think of Nielsen as the company who kills or spares TV shows using their famous ratings metrics, but the polling agency has many arms, and now one of them has reached into gaming. Nielsen is quite proud of their new gaming-focused survey, which among other things, aims to discover why exactly people bought PS4, Xbox One and the Wii U.
Would it be cliché to say the results might surprise you?
Well, that was the case for me, at least for some of the reasons buyers gave as to why they chose one console over another. And given that we know the ranking order of the trio in terms of sales (PS4 > Xbox One > Wii U), it's also a window into what consumers apparently want most out of their consoles as a whole.
According to the survey (via Eurogamer), the top reason that buyers chose the PS4 over the Xbox One and Wii U was
But because
Of course in practice, much more goes into making a game look pretty than simple resolution, and past that, tests have shown that the average consumer can't often even tell the difference between a game on PC, Xbox One or PS4 despite these kinds of resolution differences in place. Today the gap has narrowed further, with the two consoles having the same resolution across almost every multiplatform game.
So while I am surprised to see resolution as the number one reason as to why people chose PS4, I'm equally surprised to see the next four items on the list. Number two is that it's a Blu-ray player, which in this age of
What's missing? What I thought would be the most obvious factor, price, something that only appears in the Wii U's column. The blockbuster moment of E3 was Sony announcing that the PS4 would be $400 to Xbox One's $500, as the Kinect bundling added a hefty amount to Microsoft's price. Eventually the Kinect would be cut from the system and the price would drop, but by that point Sony had already garnered its massive lead.
What this polling suggests however is that not only was price not a top factor in buyers' decision-making, but the Kinect may have actually been a "pro" for Microsoft. Funnily enough, "Brand" was the number one reason people bought an Xbox One, showing a large amount of loyalty for the Xbox overall, but the number two reason was "Innovative Features." I suppose you could say that might be the Xbox One's cable box integration, but I'm guessing a big chunk of that is Kinect, which for all its problems, was supposed to be the "innovative" part of the console back when the two pieces of hardware were inseparable.
The Wii U list is the one that makes the most sense to me, with fun factor, kid-friendliness, price, exclusive games and backward compatibility the five most prominent choices, and I can't argue with a single one of those. But the PS4 and Xbox One data seems a little screwy to me, as someone who has chronicled this entire new-gen console war from the beginning as has heard every fan complaint under the sun.
I can accept that resolution was a big factor in many purchases, but that doesn't make it any less misguided of a way to choose a console. But I refuse to believe that Sony's $100 cheaper price wasn't a top reason as well.
Well, let's hear it. Why did you buy your new-gen console?
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