The Digital Dozen: 29 May 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 27 May 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	52.9	44,900
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	9.7	8,214
3	4	Aion	7.8	6,611
4	5	Eve Online	5.6	4,756
5	3	Tera	5.3	4,500
6	7	Metin 2	3.7	3,152
7	8	APB: Reloaded	3.5	3,009
8	6	Lord of the Rings Online	3.4	2,855
9	9	Guild Wars	2.5	2,123
10	10	Need For Speed World	2.0	1,709
11	12	Maple Story	1.9	1,573
12	11	Star Trek Online	1.7	1,479

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday:120,053 

Overall, the Xfire gaming community spent 5.9% fewer hours playing MMORPGs than it did the week before.  The week's big gainers in terms of hours played were Eve Online (+19.6%) and Aion (+15.3%).  The week's big losers were Tera (-33.9%), Star Trek Online (-23.4%) and Star Wars: The Old Republic (-18.3%).

Setting The Universe On Fire:  CCP's Eve Online led the Digital Dozen with a 19.6% gain in the number of hours played based on the strength of the launch of Inferno, the game's 17th free expansion.  While CCP faces player discontent over the new unified inventory feature, players still showed an interest in the game, with the actual server numbers from Eve Offline showing an average concurrent user increase of 3.6% over the previous Sunday.  Will Eve suffer from a post-expansion drop-off next week or will the end of Hulkageddon V yesterday combined with damage control efforts on the unified inventory keep the numbers high?

The Free Month Is Over, Part 1:   The game that saw the largest drop in interest on Sunday was Blue Hole Studio's Tera.  Launched on 1 May, Sunday was the last day those who purchased the game at launch would get to play before playing a subscription fee.  Apparently players who had already made their decision to not renew also stopped playing.  The biggest beneficiary of this trend appears to be the free-to-play Korean import Aion.

The Free Month Is Over, Part 2:  The failure cascade for Star Wars: The Old Republic continues after a week that saw layoffs at Bioware's Austin studio, the home for SW:TOR's development and customer relations staff.  For the first time, the Xfire community failed to play SW:TOR for at least 10,000 hours on a Sunday and the game recorded its first Digital Dozen score of under 10.0.  The near-term future looks grim as this was the first Sunday after the expiration of the free 30 days of game time that was granted to all accounts containing either a level 50 character or having a legacy level of 6.  I believe that the granting of the free game time was an effort to make the subscription numbers look good for the end of year conference call and that players will stop playing in greater numbers over the course of June.