The Digital Dozen: 28 May 2013

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 26 May 2013.  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	38.8	20,133	+6.8
2	2	Guild Wars 2	16.1	8,367	-2.1
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	10.4	5,389	-9.0
4	4	Neverwinter	9.1	4,732	+10.6
5	5	EVE Online	4.8	2,470	-6.0
6	7	Aion	4.2	2,201	-2.2
7	6	Tera	4.1	2,124	-12.7
8	8	Planetside 2	3.3	1,728	+31.8
9	9	Lord of the Rings Online	2.6	1,327	+3.1
10	--	RIFT	2.4	1,263	+38.8
11	11	APB: Reloaded	2.1	1,110	+2.8
12	--	Runescape	2.0	1,063	+29.1

 

Total Digital Dozen Hours: 51,907

The Xfire community saw its interest in MMORPGs increase on Sunday as members spent 2.4% more time playing the twelve most popular games than the week before.  Games seeing the biggest percentage increase in playtime were RIFT (+38.8%), Planetside 2 (+31.8%) and Runescape (+29.1%).  The only game seeing a double-digit decrease was Tera (-12.7%).

That Old Patch Magic - While not posting big numbers on a percentage basis, the week's overall gain was powered by World of Warcraft's 6.8% increase in playtime.  Blizzard released Patch 5.3: Escalation for the most popular western MMORPG on Tuesday. 

Another Conversion To Free-to-Play - RIFT is in the Digital Dozen for the first time in 26 weeks and only the second time in 56 weeks as players begin to prepare for the game's conversion to F2P on 12 June.  As we saw earlier this year with Tera, people will pay for the last month of a game in order to get perks like more character and bag slots.  Those purchasing Storm Legion will also receive four additional souls not available to those solely going the F2P route.

Those who only follow the Raptr charts may find RIFT's lack of presence strange, as the game is one of the most popular among the Raptr community.  For example, here are the top five games (all genres) on Raptr last week:

1.  RIFT - 734,056 hours played

2.  League of Legends - 417,941 hours played

3.  Call of Duty: Black Ops II - 389,074 hours played

4.  World of Warcraft - 238,824 hours played

5.  DOTA 2 - 176,008 hours played

The reason for the discrepency is that Trion has offered the Raptr community a lot of rewards for playing the game.  While good for members of Raptr, the uninformed could believe that RIFT is a lot more popular than World of Warcraft.  With the game going F2P, I expect the Raptr promotions to cease and that the Xfire and Raptr numbers to become closer.

Double XP Weekend - Some games may experience declines due to holidays, but don't count SOE games among them.  Sunday saw Planetside 2 experience a 31.8% as SOE held one of their double XP weekends over the U.S. Memorial Day weekend.