The Digital Dozen: 12 June 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 10 June 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	51.3	48,627
2	NR	Guild Wars 2 (Beta)	10.9	10,303
3	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	7.7	7,333
4	3	Aion	6.1	5,786
5	5	Tera	5.2	4,901
6	4	Eve Online	4.5	4,280
7	8	Lord of the Rings Online	3.6	3,401
8	7	APB: Reloaded	2.9	2,762
9	6	Metin 2	2.9	2,723
10	10	Need For Speed World	1.8	1,712
11	11	Maple Story	1.7	1,574
12	12	Star Trek Online	1.4	1,352

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday:132,498 

The number of hours played in MMORPGs by the Xfire community rose 4.4% over the previous week.  The big winner for the week was Lord of the Rings Online which saw an increase of 12.3%.  The big losers were Guild Wars (-55.7%), Metin 2 (-22.6%) and Eve Online (-15.8%).

Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend:  If Sunday was any indication, Guild Wars 2 will debut as the number 2 MMORPG by a wide margin when it finally debuts.  ArenaNet opened up more servers for the beta testers and broke 10,000 hours played.  In the meantime, Guild Wars dropped out of the Digital Dozen for the first time while the free-to-play Metin 2 took a huge hit as well.  It is unclear how much the Guild Wars 2 beta affected Eve Online as CCP's MMORPG shooter DUST 514 is also ramping up its beta.

Use the Force!  Star Wars: The Old Republic continued its nose dive Sunday, falling out of the #2 spot for the first time since The Digital Dozen began.  Sure, the game coming in at #2 was the GW2 beta so SW:TOR should regain the number 2 spot next week.  But as a sign of how far SW:TOR has fallen, during the first GW2 beta weekend on 29 April, the EA/Bioware offering beat GW2 by over 10,000 hours.  Sunday, GW2 beat SW:TOR by 3,000 hours.

Perhaps a bigger sign of the decline is that Sunday's 7,333 hours represents an over 90% decrease in the number of hours played compared to New Year's Day.  I expect that number to bounce back somewhat next week, but that is an indication that the harder-core game players have abandoned the Star Wars-themed game and that its subscriber base is most like a more casual bunch.  Just to make clear, I don't think that the 90% drop in hours played means that SW:TOR is down to 200,000 subs although I would not be surprised if the number is down to 800,000 - 900,000.