SAN DIEGO, CA – While moralists and those concerned about minors playing overly violent or sexy console games, a recent study from Electronic Entertainment Design and Research confirms what many have suspected all along: Americans like those kinds of games the best.The independent research firm recently released a study entitled “Console Intelligence Briefing 2007,” which concluded that regardless of what gaming system consumers selected, their favorite releases were rated “M,” for Mature.

Broken down by genre, rating, and features by the EEDR after collecting information from 219 retail and 187 online outlets for the Playstation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360 from console release until June 1st, GameSpot reports that the firm chose its Metacritic.com in order to help measure game popularity. Additional “authoritative sources” were used in order to gain statistics.

The results were clear; consumers give Mature titles the highest average review ratings – and that is reflected in higher sales totals, making up 10-percent of all titles released. Perhaps most impressive is the fact that consumers have purchased some titles in spite of their not being available in some major retail chains.

Action games provided to be the most popular genre, with 24-percent of all titles available during the sampling period qualifying. Shoot-em-up games, however, raked in the most money.

Interestingly, a mere 45-percent of retail games contain any online connectivity options – with only two-percent of all Wii games having online support of any kind. Nonetheless, more than twice as many games were released for Wii during its first seven months than for the Xbox 360 or PS3 during the same amount of post release time.