We're only a couple of weeks out from the big start of the 2015 Holiday season of games. Nielsen Game Rank has been tallying what everyone wants and has created an infographic on all the most anticipated titles.
Before we get into the hard numbers here's how Nielsen tabulated its results. Data for this infographic was collected after surveying over 4,800 gamers between the ages of 7-54. This data was collected between August 24 and September 19th. The scores were based on key measures including awareness, purchase intent, consumer rating and others. It's important to note that these anticipation levels are based on anticipation levels of all previous titles on the platform. We have reached out to Nielsen for further clarification but Multi-platform scores are based upon the average of all the platform scores. To give some context to these percentages 50% is an average anticipation, 70-79% is well above average, 80-89% is very strong and 90-100% is extremely high anticipation. Finally this infographic only shows games with over 70% anticipation that release in between now and the end of the calendar year. Now onto the graphic:
For Multi-Platform the rankings start with Call of Duty: Black Ops III with a 98% anticipation rating. From there Fallout 4 and Assassin's Creed: Syndicate are tied for second at 95%. The new Need for Speed is next, then Battlefront. Bringing up the rear is Rise of the Tomb Raider and Rock Band 4.
For the Xbox One only Halo 5: Guardians is on the list but it has a 100% anticipation rating. PlayStation 4 also only has one game with Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection collecting a 79%. PC shows fans looking forward to StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void and Anno 2205. The PS Vita has the new Corpse Party and Code: Realize games sitting around the 70-80% anticipation mark.
The company that is really blowing these polls out of the water though is Nintendo with 7 exclusives across WiiU and 3DS. WiiU fans are most looking forward to Yoshi's Woolly World and Animal Crossing. Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash and Devil's Third are also making the list at 80% and 76% respectively. For the 3DS Dragon Ball Z: Extreme Butoden, Legend of Zelda: Tri-force Heroes and Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon are on the list. These games are around the 75%-85% marks themselves.
I have reached out to Nielsen for clarification on their placement of Rise of the Tomb Raider, as well as for further clarification on their scoring process. This article will be updated if a reply is recieved.
UPDATE: We have received an email back from Nielsen on a couple of questions that we posed to them about their ranking process.
The Multi-platform rating for Rise of the Tomb Raider is based upon scores from people who play games on Xbox One or on PC as they are the two platforms that will be getting it first. They chose to put it in multi-platform because they felt that if they did not then they would have received similar questions from gamers asking why it wasn't included in multi-platform.
Another question was on the averaging process of multi-platform scoring. I asked if two games that got the same responses from gamers would be able to have different scores due to the history of the console, and how averaging this might skew the results. The response follows along the lines of agreeing that yes you could end up with different scores, but that for the purpose of this report Nielsen chose to just show the average, to avoid any redundancies.
Quick Take
It's great to see such a strong line up for all platforms coming this holiday season. Whether it be blockbuster exclusives like Halo 5 or games fans have been yearning for on all platforms like Fallout 4. I did raise a bit of an eyebrow at Rise of the Tomb Raiders placement on the Multi-Platform ranking.
What do you think of peoples anticipation levels? Is there any game you're looking forward to that you don't see up there? Is there any game up there that you don't think should?