Nielsen’s Top 20 Games to Watch reveals the most anticipated games of the 2011 holiday season, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 the most coveted among active U.S. gamers.

Eliminating guesswork is a marketer’s dream, which is now a definable reality with quantifiable results. The notion was put to the test to see if neuroscience could be used to help a magazine sell more copies.

Each year a trillion dollars is spent on communicating to and persuading the human brain, yet few understand how the brain really works—what’s attractive to it, how it decides what it likes and doesn’t like, and how it chooses to buy or not buy…

The latest from Nielsen’s Video Game Tracking service, shows Activision’s highly-anticipated first-person shooter Modern Warfare 2 benefits substantially from association with its multi-platinum parent franchise Call of Duty. While the title of the game was simply Modern Warfare 2 through early July, Activision recently decided to ensure gamers recognized the November-bound title as a true sequel to 2007’s hit Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare by including the Call of Duty prefix in the game title.
By comparing consumer response from Video Game Tracking before and after the name change, …

Electronic Arts enters into fitness gaming this week with the release of EA Sports Active for the Nintendo Wii. The game features a range of fitness activities plus mini-games that focus on specific sports like in-line skating and basketball. Generally,  EA Sports is a brand synonymous with male-skewing sports franchises like Madden, but as apparent from the box art, the title is being marketed more to women. So how do men and women compare in terms of key purchase metrics for the title?
Based on Nielsen Video Game Tracking data from …

With several high profile games released in the past few months, chalk one up for Halo Wars.  According to Nielsen’s weekly Video Game Tracking survey, the title generated the highest definite purchase interest among games in the week of their release for any title released through April 18 this year. In the week leading up to its March 3rd release in the US, 23 percent of gamers had strong purchase interest for the real-time strategy off-shoot of the immensely popular Halo trilogy. It narrowly beat Resident Evil 5 which garnered …