The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players
of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 9 June 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 | 40.5 | 18,359 | -11.6 |
| 2 | 2 | Guild Wars 2 | 16.6 | 7,512 | -5.4 |
| 3 | 3 | Star Wars: The Old Republic | 9.9 | 4,505 | -15.9 |
| 4 | 4 | EVE Online | 5.6 | 2,542 | -18.6 |
| 5 | 5 | Neverwinter | 5.3 | 2,393 | -15.6 |
| 6 | 9 | RIFT | 5.1 | 2,328 | +69.9 |
| 7 | 6 | Aion | 4.1 | 1,849 | -23.4 |
| 8 | 7 | Tera | 3.3 | 1,489 | -25.4 |
| 9 | 8 | Planetside 2 | 2.9 | 1,345 | -3.0 |
| 10 | -- | Lord of the Rings Online | 2.4 | 1,090 | +5.7 |
| 11 | 12 | Star Trek Online | 2.1 | 973 | -8.7 |
| 12 | 11 | APB: Reloaded | 2.1 | 942 | -12.0 |
Total Digital Dozen Hours: 45,327
On Sunday Xfire possibly had difficulty recording the time spent by the community playing MMORPGs. The total time declined by 10.1%, with 7 games suffering declines over 10%. The games leading the decline were Tera (-25.4%) and Aion (-23.4%) while RIFT was the big mover up with an increase of 69.9%.
F2P Launch - Trion officially launched the free-to-play version of RIFT last Wednesday. As is usually the case the popularity of the game rose dramatically as players rushed to try the game. However, the game only made it to the number 6 slot on the list, which does not bode well for its long term health. Of course, with the game so closely tied to Raptr, the numbers on Xfire are probably lower than reality.
Left Behind - As RIFT rose, two other fantasy F2P games, Tera and Aion, fell over 20% each. While the apparent technical difficulties affected most games, the fact that Tera and Aion led the pack indicates that a lot of players decided to go sightseeing in RIFT. The question is how long will those players stay away.
"The question is how long will those players stay away".
ReplyDeleteIf the experiences we saw before with games going F2P are a model, we will see that plaeyrs returning back to original games in one or two weeks.
However, take note that maybe that not work for WoW. Percentile numbers can be misleading, because if you use absolute number of hours you will see that WoW lose more players for Rift than all other MMO together. I am not sure if that players will return or go try other F2P/B2P MMO now that they tasted something "diferent".
Each game that goes F2P and each game that launch as F2P/B2P will eat a piece of WoW players. That will continue until WoW goes itself F2P.