Nintendo Wii Gameplay Stats

Earlier this month (weeks ago, I'm know), there were some very interesting posts on Kotaku.com about how long a person that buys or rents a Nintendo Wii game plays that particular game.

The posts can all be found under the Wii Stats Report tag on Kotaku, and they are making me think very creatively about ways this data could be used to change the way game marketing or game recommendation systems could possibly work, if this were a perfect world where this data was out in the public eye.

The page you probably want to start on would be this one:
The Ten Most Avidly-Played Wii Games in America (As Of July 1)
The games on this page are the ones that people are really getting their money's worth out of. The average person that owns Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which was purchased most likely for $50, has gotten 68 hours, 51 minutes of gameplay out of it! How many of any kind of multimedia item have you ever purchased at full MSRP and were able to get entertainment out of it at the cost of less than a dollar per hour?

Compare that to the average play time for Wii Fit, 18 hours and 18 minutes. For $90, each person that's buying that game is paying $5 an hour.

The wheels that spin in my head when reading these posts lead me to wish that there was some way to accomodate this kind of data into game reviews and recommendations. I imagine something like this:

"Compared to people in similar demographic groups to you and also to people overall, you only play your games about half as much as the average user. Also, you've put way more time into sports games than average and a lot less time in when you've purchased RPGs. Even though our review scores for Mario Super Sluggers and Fire Emblem are roughly the same, we can estimate that you'll get so much more for your money if you get Mario Super Sluggers! Based on average usage with adjustments for your preferences, we think you'll play the game for 30 hours. Not bad for $50, right?"

Of course, those are exactly the kind of things that will never exist because Nintendo and every other seller of everything everywhere secretly hopes that you don't play one game or use one thing too long so that you can come back and buy the next thing down the line. That, and because really the only person that this would help sell a game to is, well, me.