The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players
of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 3 November 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 | 41.6 | 14,012 | -8.4 |
| 2 | 2 | Guild Wars 2 | 15.4 | 5,174 | -4.4 |
| 3 | 4 | Star Wars: The Old Republic | 10.0 | 3,358 | -1.5 |
| 4 | 3 | Final Fantasy XIV | 9.0 | 3,016 | -16.4 |
| 5 | 5 | EVE Online | 4.9 | 1,654 | -11.5 |
| 6 | -- | Aion | 4.0 | 1,347 | +162.1 |
| 7 | 6 | Tera | 3.8 | 1,289 | -5.3 |
| 8 | 7 | RIFT | 3.1 | 1,057 | +7.8 |
| 9 | 8 | Lord of the Rings Online | 2.9 | 990 | +14.6 |
| 10 | 10 | Planetside 2 | 1.8 | 612 | -3.0 |
| 11 | -- | CABAL Online | 1.8 | 593 | +38.9 |
| 12 | 9 | APB: Reloaded | 1.6 | 541 | -17.5 |
Total Digital Dozen Hours: 33,643
The slow decline in the Xfire community's interest in MMORPGs continued again Sunday. This week's 4.6% decline in the time members played the most popular games was led by World of Warcraft (-1290 hours) and Final Fantasy XIV (-591 hours). The games experiencing the biggest percentage gains were Aion (+162.1%) and CABAL Online (+38.9%).
Unexplained - I can't explain why Aion and CABAL Online experienced the rise in play time, but they broke into the Digital Dozen this week. Aion returned with a vengeance after a one week absence, leaping back into the sixth spot with its best performance in six weeks. CABAL Online, on the other hand, returned to the list for only the second time. The first time was on 23 September 2012.
A Successful Patch - Amidst a general downturn in the hours played in all games, RIFT is staging something of a revival after the launch of Patch 2.4 in September. The game has experienced an overall rise in playtime of 77.9% since 22 September and has seen playtime increase each of the last three weeks. Over the same time six week time period, the overall time spent playing games listed in the Digital Dozen has decreased by 18.1%.
Excitement For An Expansion - As the Helm's Deep expansion for Lord of the Rings Online nears, expect players to take advantage of the 100% experience point boost to catch up to the new content. LOTRO saw a 14.6% increase in play time by the Xfire community Sunday.
I'm curious whether the ongoing decline in interest shown here is limited to MMOs. Have other game genres shown a corresponding decline among XFire users?
ReplyDeleteIf they have it could indicate a decline in the use of XFire itself rather than in the games. Or it could indicate an across-the-board decline in interest in PC gaming, which wouldn't surprise me at all. Mobile gaming must be really beginning to cut into both the PC and Console market by now.
It very well could be a decline in the interest of using Xfire, now that we have things like Steam starting to ramp up its communities. Or just a general decline in PC gaming. I don't follow the non-MMOs, but I can remember League of Legends having around 140-160K hours on Sundays when I started doing this and now it hovers in the 70K hour range.
DeleteIf CABAL had 593 play hours in the week, aren't we getting into the territory where the significant % change could actually be caused by a few heavy players installing Xfire for the first time? It just seems like it must be a small enough sample size to be vulnerable to such effects.
ReplyDeleteThat's a fair point and something I didn't really think would happen so soon. For example, at the beginning of the year a game couldn't get on the list unless the game had been played for 1600+ hours. Now? Games get on with only 500.
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