This week Blake Snow over at GigaOM published an article about the Top 10 Most Popular MMOs, and I have reproduced the list below:
This story was picked up by bunch of folks and I think it raises some interesting questions regarding what these numbers mean. One point to make is that I personally do not consider Second Life to be a game, but the goal for GigaOM was to track the top 10 online worlds not games. This is a relatively interesting list considering that the list includes both free and pay content, and I wonder how much crossover occurs between these games. For myself, I have Guild Wars and was an active WOW player for a while. I also wonder what makes an active user, and while this would mean some playtime is necessary - the article does not indicate how much is needed.
Now over at XFire, they also track statistics of their users and they have a another top 10 list that lays out play time based on average hours per day. That list is reproduced here:
This list is all about games and shows a much different view of the MMO market. The interesting fact for me was that Maple Story did not show up on the other list, but that is not really what is important. The data collected is from actual gameplay numbers, but only for those users who also run XFire.
These lists give some great insights into who is the 800 pound gorilla of MMOs, but I think it does show that there are some other options out there for folks.
Posted by Tim at Monday June 18, 2007 - 10:51 AM | TrackBack (0) | Category: MMO | © 2007 Gaming Signal
Excellent write-up, Tim.
I think that XFire is tilted towards the more hardcore gamers. However, that can't explain Maple Story being there - hardcore gamers aren't playing Maple Story, are they?
Guild Wars is odd too - they've just sold $2M copies, but who knows what the average monthly usage is. Same for WoW really - what percentage of the 8.5M login at least once a month?
Posted by Scottsh on Tuesday June 19, 2007 at 1:57 PM