| Rank | Prev Week | Game | Score | Hours Played | +/- % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | World of Warcraft | 45.6 | 12,422 | +2.3 |
| 2 | 2 | Guild Wars 2 | 14.0 | 3,828 | +2.2 |
| 3 | 3 | Star Wars: The Old Republic | 10.3 | 2,809 | +17.8 |
| 4 | 5 | EVE Online | 5.6 | 1,525 | +11.4 |
| 5 | 4 | Final Fantasy XIV | 5.4 | 1,484 | -2.0 |
| 6 | 7 | Tera | 3.8 | 1,027 | -13.5 |
| 7 | 6 | Aion | 3.5 | 950 | -22.3 |
| 8 | 8 | Neverwinter | 2.9 | 801 | -10.6 |
| 9 | 9 | RIFT | 2.4 | 660 | -17.3 |
| 10 | 10 | Planetside 2 | 2.3 | 635 | -11.6 |
| 11 | 12 | Lord of the Rings Online | 2.2 | 596 | -4.8 |
| 12 | -- | CABAL Online | 1.9 | 512 | +6.2 |
Total Digital Dozen Hours: 27,249
Sunday saw the Xfire community spend 2 more hours playing MMORPGs than it did the weekend before. The game that experienced the biggest jump in popularity was Star Wars: The Old Republic (+424 hours) while Aion saw the biggest drop (-272 hours). Runescape fell out of the list and was replaced by CABAL Online. Sunday was CABAL Online's third ever appearance on The Digital Dozen and first since September 2013.
The Thrill Is Over - Apparently the bump that Aion received with the release of the Steel Cavalry patch is over. While managing not to drop during last week's 7.3% overall decline in the Xfire community's playtime of the top MMORPGs, Aion saw a 22.3% decline this week.
A Permanent Bump? - EVE Online recovered from last week's overall decline and has seen an increase of 22.3% in the hours spent playing with internet spaceships by the Xfire community since the Battle of B-R5RB. This is significant because CCP saw a huge increase in the number of trial accounts opened immediately after the battle. Those 14-day trials have expired, which means that CCP succeeded in converting those trial accounts into playing accounts. In other indications of permanent growth, actual peak concurrent user numbers reached over 50,000 for three straight days and CCP is increasing the cap on the size of corporations (guilds in other games) in order to accommodate the influx of new players. It's nice to see that the Xfire numbers can show the increase in actual numbers of players.
I think 2 weeks is a little premature to suggest the bump in Eve is "permanent". I think you want to look 6-8 weeks out, bare minimum. I am betting a lot of those players are people who got a trial account in the 2nd week.
ReplyDeleteThe new player experience is still a disaster, and let's see what happens when the goons launch their next grief offensive against high sec.
Unless of course, CCP whispers a word in mittens' ear and tells him to back off attacking new miners and haulers in high sec.
Usually with the Xfire numbers we see a drop in the numbers back to the start point after a free weekend trial or after the first month after the launch of a game when the initial 30 days is over. I would have expected something like that with EVE, but we haven't seen that. We may see that reflected in the numbers on 16 or 23 March, which is when the first subscriptions run out. But so far CCP is looking a lot better than expected.
Deletei heard that ccp used evil tricks to give people more time to decide if they like eve.
Deletesome people mentioned that after usingthe 21 day trial they had no option to subscribe for one month. 3 month was the shortest available option.
Hi, could it be that the second link under "A Permanent Bump" is the wrong one? It point to the page as the first one, and I couldn't find anything related to growing corp sizes there.
ReplyDelete(feel free to remove this post after reading)
Oops! Fixed.
Delete