Nielsen Media Research on Wednesday announced that it is launching GamePlay Metrics, a new rating service for videogames. The all-electronic ratings service will establish new metrics for the buying and selling of advertising in videogames and will also track the activities of gamers across other media platforms, such as TV and the internet.

GamePlay Metrics will be the first offering from the newly created Nielsen Wireless and Interactive Services division. The new data will enable the videogame industry to develop an advertising business model to offset the steep development costs of new titles for next-generation consoles. The metrics will also give advertisers a greater level of precision for targeting the digital consumer.

The new measurement service will provide advertisers, agencies, hardware manufacturers and game developers with independent quantitative demographic data for negotiating the buying and selling of in-game and around-game advertising.

Nielsen's GamePlay Metrics service also will provide advertisers with comprehensive analysis on how videogame play affects or complements the use of other electronic media. For example, the data will show what television programs gamers watch when they're not playing games.

The new service builds on Nielsen's Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2) initiative - which provides integrated ratings for video consumption across multiple media platforms - by harvesting information from existing Nielsen samples.

Nielsen's national television sample of more than 10,000 households currently collects information on videogame use through existing People Meter technology. Nielsen GamePlay Metrics will use a patented approach to harvest this existing information from current and next-generation videogame consoles within these sample households.

Nielsen GamePlay Metrics will begin providing videogame ratings data in mid-2007. Subscribing clients will receive, on a weekly basis, ratings charts and rankings that show the most-played videogames.

Nielsen Wireless and Interactive Services was launched Wednesday as a business unit to provide measurement services to the videogame and wireless industries. The new unit will draw on the resources within VNU's Media Measurement and Information (MMI) Group, including Nielsen Media Research and Nielsen Entertainment, which recently reported the Nielsen Active Gamer 2006 study.