NPD provides stats on game promotion, platform cross-ownership

Or are you a Wii owner with a PS3?

the same way they came up with... nevermind. i'm staying out of this one...

Perhaps they are going by initial purchase? So those who bought console X first also bought console Y later. Just an idea.

Because there are more 360 owners than PS3 owners, so yeah, it makes sense since it's a percentage.

Maybe this will help?

10 people own both ps3 and 360. = a

200 people own 360 = x

100 people own ps3. = y

so 10% (a/y) of ps3 owners own a 360

but 5% (a/x) of 360 owners own a ps3

SoncSpike's answer was my first thought when I saw the percentages.

And you thought you would never need Venn diagrams in real life.

Math is haaaard~!

what's more confusing is that 42% of wii owners have an xbox 360.
18% of 360 owners own a wii.
that would mean that there are twice as many people who own a xbox 360 than who own a wii.

That's just plain wrong. the survey is flawed is whats wrong.
if you look at the methedology, they gave a survey to about 20,000 people on a website from anywhere from 2 years of age to whatever. Afterwards, it was weighted to the census data on age and sex. they took bad data and then skewed it.

oops, I had my numbers mixed. 42% of 360 owners own a wii. 26% of wii owners own a 360. It's still useless info, but I messed up either way.

Math is delicious!

k

Sorry, there is a lot of fun you are missing out on

I've got a WiiS360

I would just like to add that I disagree with his downvote. By adding "pure speculation" on the end he was implying that he was just throwing the idea up in the air, rather than being a fanboy prick.

*spits on Spartan for buying a Valve game on a console*

Rather than downvoting me could you please explain why I had no right to spit on him? Currently all I can see is fanboyism...

Yeah really people. Spitting on others is just one of the many wonderful freedoms our glorious nation enjoys. If they take our spit, they take our freedom!

Yeah, but I wasn't seriously talking about spitting on him.
It was more a joke about how Valve games are always way better on PC.
Anyone think otherwise??

Unless you can specifically articulate why L4D is a lousy experience on the 360 you should probably just get lost.

L4D isn't a lousy experience on the consoles, but the PC version has tons of extra content that comes in the form of patches; which doesn't get released on the consoles because Microsoft charges developers money to release free patches.
The same can be said for nearly all Valve games; console Half life has no Counter Strike, console Half Life 2 has no Gmod (or Zombie panic, or Synergy etc. etc.), Console TF2 has significantly less content and balancing compared to the PC version. Console CS: Source doesn't exist. :D No real issues with console Portal though, the mods for that were pretty crap and Valve didn't release a whole lot of new content.
Plus the servers for the PC versions will ALWAYS be up, as they are hosted by fans and not a console manufacturer so you know you can play it until you no longer want to.
Plus all Valve games (with the exception of L4D which requires a $40 graphics card update...) are incredibly versatile in the hardware they can run on and ill look good on your X700s from 2004 (unlike the PS3 version of Orange Box which lags on a CPU that is as good as many modern gaming rigs). Need I go on?
I assumed this was common knowledge. I guess I was wrong.
Sorry for all hate I have sparked. Thank you Markez for being so mature.
And done!

It all depends how they did their study. Statistical significance, multivariate analysis etc. A small sample size doesn't need to make it useless if they ran the study well, but the smaller the sample size, the less chance of it being statistically significant.

Oh, and just to show I'm not just a stats geek, this is coming out because I'm writing an essay at the minute and have read a few papers with statistics in it.

you need to take some courses in statistics, or at least read up on it. the entire point of sampling is that you can approximate the truth of what you're looking for (often to 90% or greater accuracy) by taking a randomly selected, representative sample of the greater population. obviously, no study can ever ask everyone in the world to participate. fortunately, plenty of very intelligent people have proven that we don't have to. if we want to conduct a survey of, say, the eating habits of an entire country, generally a randomly selected sample of about 1000 or so will give you the correct results to about 95% accuracy.

@Thor: Right, and that demonstrates you know nothing about statistics so we should ignore your opinion. (Yes, this is a putdown - but yes, I'm also being utterly serious.)

How many statistical surveys and posts will it take before people understand that a small sample size can represent a large population with a low margin of error? That, in fact, once you get beyond a certain population size, it's actually the *same* size sample you need? (I.e. it doesn't matter if you have 1 million or 100 million or even 100 trillion people in the population being considered, a sample size of a few thousand is going to be fine.)

Small samples are suspect when they have systematic bias (for example, if you try to do a survey on who owns which consoles, and you ask all the students at a particular university - obviously that will be biased because the answer might be different in different groups of the population other than students). But a carefully-controlled sample of, say, 500 people is going to give much better results than if you had 5,000 university students.

In other words if you want to be critical of the survey then the right response is, 'I don't think this sample is likely to be representative, because...' (an example reason might be that a survey used internet polling, and even if you correct that for demographic groups, there could still possibly be some systematic bias among people who have the internet and those who don't).

'I don't think this sample is large enough' is generally always going to be utterly wrong if it's a professional survey. They'll have done the sums; it will be large enough. But making sure that sample is actually representative can be a lot trickier.

I looked at the chart wrong:
42% of 360 owners own a wii
18% of wii ownders own a 360.
That actually makes more sense, so they probably compiled it from actual numbers instead of asking what they own.

Either way though, the data is still useless for the reasons I provided.

I'd say it has a lot to do with the fact that PS3 and Wii (especially) have more games that you can't get on PC. Everyone has a PC, and combined with a PS3 you get the majority of HD games (unlike the PC/360 combo which is a bit lacking in the Japanese game area). Plus I think the Wii has enough good games to be worth the money on its own. Looking at mine, I have 9 games (excluding Sports and Play), but I definitely don't recommend it as your only console. I personally put my vote in for Wii+DS+PC combo and you can have the best HD, SD (especially is your computer is good enough to run PS2 games w/o lag), and LD (low definition) games on the market. Except FFXIII. :D