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No matter what socio-economic class you reside in, damn near everyone has been impacted by the economic recession we find ourselves in. Videogames are ultimately a trivial thing in the real world, so when thinking about the impact the crisis has had on the videogame industry, you might expect any statistics pertaining to games to be far lower than in previous years. But a study by The Nielsen Company shows that not only is time spent playing videogames up, but so is the number of people subscribing to videogame rental services like GameFly, as is the ratio of used game purchases to that of new games.

“Primarily, we believe mainstream gamers are playing more of the broadly appealing games (i.e Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band) pushing their hours of gameplay up,” said Nielsen Games director of client consulting, Michael Flamberg. “The social aspects of these games have engaged them. We don’t believe hardcore gamers are driving up the usage averages we’ve observed. Second, gamers may be looking to stretch their entertainment dollar further through playing games they own more. The importance of value for them is evident in the findings on used game purchase.”

These numbers and graphs come from Nielsen surveys conducted with 2,400 gamers. As the chart above shows, the uptick in time spent playing games isn’t an isolated incident. Prior to 2009, the only time since Nielsen started tracking data that the average number of hours games were being played eclipsed 17 was in July 2007 — and that wasn’t by much. In 2009, only in May did that figure dip noticeably below 18 hours per week, and May has traditionally seen a drop-off each year (blame the improving weather). Even at 2009’s lowest point, it’s still a larger figure than the majority of 2006 or 2007 saw.

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