The Digital Dozen: 17 July 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 15 July 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	55.1	55,139
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	10.0	10,015
3	3	The Secret World	6.3	6,317
4	4	Aion	5.2	5,200
5	5	Eve Online	4.4	4,368
6	6	Metin 2	3.7	3,744
7	7	Lord of the Rings Online	3.4	3,404
8	10	Maple Story	2.7	2,735
9	8	APB: Reloaded	2.5	2,549
10	9	Tera	2.5	2,475
11	NR	Star Trek Online	2.2	2,199
12	11	Need For Speed World	2.0	2,000

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 135,477 

The Xfire community posted another increase in the amount of hours spent playing MMORPGs last week.  Sunday's 2.3% increase was the fourth increase in a row.  The big gainers percentage-wise were Star Trek Online (+60.5%), Star Wars: The Old Republic (+19.2%) and Maple Story (+13.5%).  For the first time in a long time no game saw a double-digit drop in time played on Sunday, although Tera's drop of 7.7% led all losers.

No one can resist the power...:  Since falling to its all-time low on 10 June, Star Wars: The Old Republic has bounced back with a 26.8% gain in time played in the past 5 weeks.  The increase began on the heels of the announcement of free server transfers in response to howling from the player base about dead servers.  However last week's big jump was probably due to the new free trial that allows players to play all 8 character classes up to level 15 plus allowing returning players to return to the game for 7 days beginning 10 July.

I would like to think that SWTOR is healthy, but remember the last big givaway occurred three weeks before EA announced their earnings report for their 2012 fiscal year.  Isn't the Q1 earnings call due in about 3 weeks?  Coincidence?  I suspect that on the call investors will hear the term "active accounts" instead of "subscribers" to discuss the number of players in SWTOR.

Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend:  Watch the number of hours played for every game drop next week as ArenaNet holds the third beta weekend for Guild Wars 2.  The last beta weekend saw the Xfire numbers top ten thousand hours played on 10 June.  With the Sylvari and Asura as playable races this coming Sunday expect GW2 to post similar numbers.