The Digital Dozen: 25 September 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 23 September 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played	+/- %
1	1	Guild Wars 2	46.4	51,481	-25.4
2	2	World of Warcraft	30.5	33,794	+31.7
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	4.5	4,950	-5.5
4	4	Aion	3.8	4,220	+0.9
5	5	Eve Online	2.9	3,210	-9.3
6	6	Metin 2	2.6	2,931	-6.2
7	7	Lord of the Rings Online	2.2	2,440	-0.0
8	8	APB: Reloaded	1.9	2,130	+1.7
9	9	Need For Speed World	1.6	1,798	-1.1
10	11	Vindictus	1.5	1,637	+14.3
11	10	Star Trek Online	1.1	1,261	-12.6
12	--	Cabal Online	1.0	1,100	+36.4

  Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 136,554  

Last Sunday saw another 7.3% drop in the amount of time spent playing MMORPGs by the Xfire community.  The big losers in percentage terms were Guild Wars 2 (-25.4%) and Maple Story (-20.1%).  The loss in playtime for Maple Story dropped the game off the list.  The big gainers were Cabal Online, making it into The Digital Dozen for the first time with a 36.4% gain and World of Warcraft (+31.7%).

No big deal.  Guild Wars 2 has seen a decline in play time of 44.6% over the past 3 weeks.  But unlike all of the subscription games that have debuted since December, GW2's business model of buying the game and not paying a subscription means that ArenaNet has probably collected all of the money it planned to collect from the players who have left the game.  Of course, those players may come back to visit, which is another element of the business model.

Pandas, pandas, pandas.  World of Warcraft's Mists of Pandaria expansion goes live today and players apparently returned to the game Sunday to start preparing for the new content.  I expect WoW to vault back to the top of the list next week.