Video Games Europe presents GameTrack to measure entire games market

Video Games Europe has officially presented GameTrack today in London. GameTrack is a new multi-country tracking survey designed to provide a complete view of the video games market. Video Games Europe commissioned Ipsos MediaCT to run the project. “This project was instigated by games publishers," says Simon Little, Managing Director at Video Games Europe. “It has been scoped and developed with the assistance of the biggest names in the industry, with a clear eye on commercial relevance and the long term aim of becoming a standard reference.”

Extensive chart information is already available on a weekly basis for retail, download and apps. But the objective of GameTrack is to cover all forms of video gaming in a single source survey - the key benefit being that this enables an unprecedented understanding of how individuals play games (and acquire content) across all of the devices and all of the types of games that exist within the market.

In terms of devices, this includes all devices that might be used for playing video games – PCs and laptops, games consoles and portables, smartphones and tablets as well as emerging niche devices such as smart TVs. Similarly, this includes all types of games – from packaged (new, pre-owned and rental) to apps (paid and free) to online games (including downloads, subscriptions, browser games and games on social network sites). New devices and new types of games will be added as they appear in the market.

Fundamental to GameTrack are three key metrics, with each breaking down the total market by specific devices and types of games:

• Time - the amount of time that is spent gaming
• Acquisition volume - the number of games being acquired (both paid and free)
• Spend - the amount of money being spent on games

From its inception, it was a critical requirement that GameTrack should provide the most robust and realistic measure available anywhere of the size of the video games market in each country. Central to this is the research method – a combination of in-home face-to-face interviewing (which is quite unique for this kind of research) and online self-completion surveys.  The survey includes respondents aged 6 and over (with parents assisting children with the survey). Each month, 1,000 surveys are completed in each country using each of these two methods, to provide quarterly bases of some 6,000 surveys per country. GameTrack currently runs in the UK, France and Germany and Spain, with plans to add further markets in the near future.